Uncategorized – Page 81 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

The next big dream

When I graduated from college, my goal for my writing career was this: to make a living telling stories that I love. It seemed, at the time, like an impossible dream–something so far out of my reach that I couldn’t possibly achieve it without years and years of constantly frustrated effort.

Well, guess what? For the past six months or so, I’ve more or less been doing it. I live below the poverty line in a basement with two other guys, and I have to donate plasma to cover the difference in my expenses each month, but writing is my main gig and I’m making enough to pay all my bills with it. Barely.

There’s more to life than making a living, though, even doing something that you love. My current month-to-month lifestyle isn’t particularly well suited for anything except, well, living month-to-month. So I need to make some changes, and to do that, I first need to dream a little bigger:

A really good dream should be–or at least seem to be–a little bit impossible. That way, you don’t have to worry about achieving it too soon. At the same time, it shouldn’t be too impossible. If you can’t see myself ever achieving it, then what’s the point?

For example, one of my bucket list goals is to look down on this planet from space. With the awesome advances in spaceflight that companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are making right now, I can totally see that happening in my lifetime. But setting foot on an alien world? Nah, I don’t think that’s in the cards for me.

(Then again, if we figure out how to live forever, maybe it could actually happen. Even just adding another 50 or 100 years to my life would probably let me live to see a permanent base on the Moon or Mars. So maybe impossible is actually better–I don’t know.)

A friend of mine is building a business that he hopes will one day make him a cool seven figures. His mom makes six figures, but her name is also on six mortgages, so she’s pretty much tied to her job. One of his big dreams is to pay off all those mortgages for her so that she can retire.

When that happens, he’s going to celebrate by getting a bunch of friends together on a road trip to Texas. We’ll take a big refrigerated meat truck down there and go wild boar hunting until it’s packed full of pork. Then we’ll come back to Utah and have the mother of all barbecues. 😀

That’s the kind of dream I need to shoot for: something specific and personal that sounds kind of crazy but is still just barely within reach. In other words, it should be something that’ll make a good story when I finally achieve it. Or maybe I won’t achieve it–maybe the dream itself be so awesome that just the act of striving for it will make all the difference. As David Gemmell once wrote:

May all your dreams come true save one, for what is life without a dream?

It’s going to take more than one blog post to figure this whole dream thing out, so I’ll just leave that here for now. It’s definitely going to be on my mind for the next little while. If you have any impossible dreams of your own, please do share!

Thoughts on writers, reviewers, and stalkers

The bookish side of the English-speaking internet exploded last week with an article in The Guardian about an author who stalked a Goodreads reviewer, showing up unannounced on the reviewer’s doorstep and going to great lengths to expose the reviewer’s identity. The crazy part–or crazier, I guess, since the whole thing is batshit crazy–is that the Guardian article was written by the author/reviewer herself.

It gets crazier, though. This same author, in another article published a little over a year ago, confessed/bragged to stalking someone else who she perceived as crossing her, this time assaulting her victim both physically and verbally. According to Jezebel, even after she was brought into court and censured for her brazen act of assault, she continued to stalk this person online, to the point where the police intervened a second time.

I normally do my best to stay away from drama like this. However, with the issues that this case raises and the way that it’s rocking the book world right now, I feel that I ought to add my own thoughts to the public discussion that’s happening right now.

First, I think that this author’s actions were completely inexcusable. Period. No book review, however critical, justifies hunting the reviewer down and showing up unannounced on her doorstep. Furthermore, when you read the original review that sparked the whole incident (and the subsequent Goodreads discussion thread), you realize that the author’s characterization of the reviewer is simply untrue. Was the reviewer “bullying” the author? Because she seems perfectly civil (if perhaps a bit enthusiastic) on that thread–much more civil than the author’s fans, in fact.

If there’s any bullying that happened in this case, clearly the worst offender is the author. She not only crossed the line of civility, but she also demonstrated herself to be both dangerous and unpredictable. And after all of that, to write about it in the Guardian–that is crossing a whole new line altogether.

It’s frustrating for me, because bad actors like this completely undermine the review space for all of us. Reviews–honest ones, critical ones–are an important part of a healthy book culture. They are helpful to readers in deciding whether or not to read a book, and they are helpful to authors in guiding our books to the readers who will enjoy them the most.

At the same time, reviews for readers and not for authors. When authors argue with reviewers, it undermines the review space for everyone. Arguing with a reader is not going to change their opinion of a book, and being public about it makes other reviewers think twice about posting anything less than a diabetically saccharine review.

And then you have a case like this, where one batshit-crazy nutcase goes over the deep end so spectacularly that she tarnishes the review space for everyone.

I have to be honest–this story pisses me off, not only as a reader and a reviewer, but as an author as well. Have I received negative reviews? Certainly. Does it sting when I get them? Of course it does–and the ones that sting the most are the ones that bring up good points. Do I engage with negative reviews? Only when I feel that there’s a point that needs clarification, and then only in the most non-intrusive and non-confrontational way possible.

Whenever I hear about reviewers bullying authors, it almost always turns out upon closer examination that the author is behaving just as badly, if not much worse. For that reason, I have very little sympathy for authors in these cases, especially when reviewers everywhere are made to feel unsafe. This narcissistic literary pettiness helps no one, at the ones who get burned the most are almost always the reviewers.

So that’s my $.02. Now time to do something productive with my time and energy–like, y’know, actually write or something. Take care.

Why writing retreats and seminars make me uneasy

Writing retreats and seminars make me uneasy. I’ve never attended one, mostly because the prices tend to run so high, and that’s part of what makes me so uneasy about them. Yes, writing is a business, and yes, the author deserves to be paid, but paid for what exactly? For telling stories, or for telling other people how to tell stories?

There’s an unfortunate tendency in the writing world, especially the SF&F corner of the writing world, for us to elevate authors to a quasi-godlike status and take them as a definitive final authority on the field. Certainly, when Brandon Sanderson or Orson Scott Card gives an opinion, I give it more weight than an anonymous handle on a message board somewhere. At the same time, though, an opinion is just an opinion, no matter where it comes from.

You don’t have to shell out a lot of money to learn the craft of writing. There are lots of excellent books on the subject, as well as online communities, videos on Youtube–I think all of Brandon Sanderson’s lectures from his English 318R class at BYU are now up on Youtube. More importantly, there’s no one stopping you from sitting down in front of a computer (or setting out a pen and paper) and learning from doing it yourself. So why do we need all these huge, expensive retreats and seminars?

Perhaps my view on this subject is different because I’m an indie writer. One of the great things about self-publishing is that it tears down the walls, throws open the gates, and levels the playing field for everyone. Since we all can be authors now, the pedestals are a lot shorter. The old authorities are no longer quite so definitive, because there’s so much room for experimentation in this new marketplace.

In the indie writing community, there’s a very strong ethic of sharing. Hugh Howey is probably the biggest example of this. He repeatedly goes out of his way to help his fellow writers, putting together the Author Earnings Report and being very generous in sharing everything he’s learned. He’s also very modest about it, constantly putting other, lesser-known authors forward as much better writers than he is. Instead of capitalizing on his knowledge by creating artificial scarcity, he puts it all out there on his blog and the internet communities where he participates.

Of course, retreats and seminars are just as useful for the networking opportunities as they are for the actual instruction. The thing is, just how useful is that networking really? The market is open–we all have access to readers now. The gatekeepers no longer have the power to make or break anyone’s career. And if you’re in the business of writing and telling stories, what better way to network is there than doing exactly that? Sure, it can boost your career to be on a first-name basis with a successful author/editor, but if you don’t also have the writing chops to back that up, it’s not going to do you much good.

I don’t want to call in doubt the motivations of those authors who do put on retreats and seminars. I think that for the most part, their motives are pure. But the structure is one of artificial scarcity that props up this legacy model of gatekeepers and pedestals. It makes me uneasy, because it grants too much of an air of solemnity and authority in a field where the brightest new voices are often self-taught.

Perhaps the thing that makes me most uneasy about these retreats and seminars is the fact that I’ve received so much bad writing advice over the years. To the extent that I have succeeded at all, it has been in spite of the advice I’ve received, not because of it. When I see people turning around and selling their advice for top dollar, it makes me very uneasy, regardless of their motivation in doing it.

I never want to participate as an instructor in expensive retreats or seminars. I don’t feel comfortable supporting that sort of thing. If I ever do get to the point where people would pay to hear me pontificate, I’m going to be very careful not to put myself out there as a definitive authority, since I’m sure any of my advice will be just as harmful to the wrong person as it is helpful to the right person. As for networking, I’d much rather do that through collaborating, reviewing, guest blogging, and putting anthologies together.

Cooking with cast iron

So a little while ago, I mentioned how my parents had sent me their old cast-iron skillet. It had been sitting in the basement unused for the better part of a decade, and had gunked up pretty bad with rust and other stuff.

Well, I’m happy to say that I got it cleaned up! Toad, a friend from my short story writing group, helped me out with it. We poured a bunch of salt into the bottom as an abrasive and scrubbed it down with a rag and some oil. After that, we fried some eggs up, seasoning the skillet with oil both before and after (we didn’t even bother seasoning it in the oven, just did it all on the stove top).

Right away, we could tell that this was a good quality piece of cast iron. You can tell by how smooth the surface is. The cheaper modern and/or Chinese stuff has a fairly rough surface, so that food tends to get stuck in it. The good old-fashioned skillets are much smoother.

I’ve been cooking regularly with it ever since, and I can confirm that these things only get better with use! Here are a couple of things I’ve been cooking with it:

I love omelettes, but it’s hard to cook them in old teflon pans because the eggs tend to stick (or worse, the teflon peels off into the food). However, in my cast-iron skillet, it’s not a problem at all! In the picture above, I mixed two eggs with chives, red pepper, garlic salt, and a splash of milk. Later, I added a sprinkling of cheddar and mozzarella. To oil the pan, I used about 2/3rds tablespoon of butter.

I’m not very good at turning these things over, but as you can see it’s not really sticking to the pan at all. If it does, it’s not hard to scrape it off. I use only metal cookware with this skillet, so I don’t have to worry about melting plastic (ever notice how an old plastic spatula tends to have a sharp edge with bits of plastic peeling off?). And honestly, it doesn’t take much work to scrape food off of this thing, even when it does stick.

Another thing I love to cook in my cast-iron skillet is hash browns. I’ve got a small herb garden in my kitchen window, so I fry up my potatoes with rosemary, chives, and dill. It tastes FANTASTIC.

With my old second-hand teflon pans, I could never get the potatoes very crispy because they’d always stick to the pan if I cooked them for too long. But with cast iron, that isn’t a problem at all! As you can see in the picture above, these potatoes are browning quite nicely.

But that isn’t even the best part.

See that? It’s a selfie I took in the bottom of the pan after cooking all the stuff above! I didn’t wash it at all, I just dropped a little bit of oil on it and used a paper towel to wipe it down.

I’m telling you, this cast-iron skillet is AMAZING. I can cook whatever I want in this thing! Even better, I fully expect that this skillet will outlive me. It’s WAY more durable than any other piece of kitchen equipment that I’ve ever seen. And it’s versatile, too–I can hardly wait to go camping with it!

A cast iron birthday!

So my 30th birthday is this month, and my parents gave me what may quite possibly prove to be the best birthday present ever: the family’s old cast iron skillet! These things are AWESOME for cooking–they heat evenly, hold warmth for a long time, have a better non-stick surface than teflon (if you care for it properly), can be used on anything from ovens to electric stove tops to campfire coals, and are virtually indestructible. I can’t wait to start using mine!

As you can see from the photo, though, it needs quite a bit of work. There’s a lot of old gunk and rust that needs to be scraped off, and it needs to be tempered and seasoned. Tempering is the process where you heat up the iron to let the oil soak into the pores, so that when it cools down, you have a thin layer of oil bonded to the surface. That’s what gives it the nonstick properties and keeps it from rusting. If you wash a cast iron skillet in soap, it scrubs off that all-important layer of oil, leaving it exposed to water which makes it oxidize and rust. That’s what happened here.

Fortunately, these things are so indestructible that a little bit of rust isn’t going to ruin it. It’ll take some work to get it cleaned up and functional again, but I could use a fun side-project to keep me busy. Besides, I have a writing buddy down the street who can help me out with it. He’s a pretty interesting guy: he has a 3D printer, grows most of the food he eats, worked on film sets for a few years, does some gunsmithing on the side–like I said, he’s an interesting guy. I believe the Grantville Gazette has bought a couple of his stories, though they have yet to come out in print. We’re thinking about collaborating together, or maybe starting a podcast.

In any case, this is going to be an AWESOME project that I’m sure will keep me occupied for the next long while. I can hardly wait to fry some bacon in this thing! Bacon, and baked beans, and cornbread … mmm!

The door hissed open

Heinlein’s doors famously “iris” open, and the doors in my novels “hiss” open. That gives us a pretty good idea what it sounds like, but what does it look like?

This:

That part at the end where he presses the two keys and steps through–that is almost exactly what I imagine it looks like when one of my characters palms an access panel.

Someday when I’m a homeowner, I’m going to install doors like this in every major room in my house. I kid you not. And if I run out of other projects, I’ll build a standing jacuzzi like the shower units in my novels, with nozzles that blast you from all sides and a drier that blows hot air from the top. That is a Youtube video that I would love to see.

Live long and prosper, my friends. May the stars of Earth continually align in your favor.

Short Blitz #7: Starchild

Title: Starchild
Genre: Space Opera
Word Count: 3,000
Writing Time: about two weeks

I haven’t trimmed or polished this story yet, but I’m calling it at 3,000 words. If I were stricter about following Heinlein’s rules, I would only give it a proofreading pass, but with shorts I’ve heard that it’s best to cut out as many unnecessary words as possible, so I’ll give it a solid pass before sending it out.

Unlike all of my other short stories so far, this one takes place in the same universe as my novels and novellas. Specifically, it takes place in the Star Wanderers universe, at an unspecified system deep in the Outworld frontier. It’s about a girl in the strictly regimented society of an isolated space colony, who decides to be the first from their outpost to win the heart of a star wanderer. More generally, it’s about the cycle of life on a frontier space station and the inevitable loss of innocence from contact with the outside.

The idea came to me while I was on vacation, so I didn’t do much with it for the first week. I dabbled with it while I was out at the Cape, writing a little here and there, but it wasn’t until I was on the train headed back that I dedicated some serious time and effort to it.

My sister lives in Iowa, at almost the exact midway point between Massachusetts and Utah, so I decided to stop by and pay her a visit along the way. I finished the story this afternoon at her house, and I plan to print it out and submit it to F&SF while I still have access to their printer. What can I say … I’m cheap. :p

I don’t think this will be the last short story that I write in the Star Wanderers universe. If I could write a few good ones that get picked up by a major magazine like Asimov’s or Clarkesworld, that would be a great way to bring in more readers. I figure a story in the same universe as my other books will be much better at that than a generic short story, and since self-publishing is my bread and butter, the more I can get my short stories to serve that, the better.

In any case, now that thing one is done, I can focus all of my attention on Sons of the Starfarers. If all goes well, Book III: Strangers in Flight will be published in the next couple of weeks, and Book IV: Friends in Command
will be finished (at least the rough draft) by mid-October. This was a nice project to work on during vacation, but now that it’s finished, it’s time to get back to work!

Almost back from vacation

So I’m in Massachusetts now, getting ready to head back to Utah by way of my sister’s in Iowa. I spent the last week on Cape Cod for family vacation, which was a lot of fun! Cape Cod is one of my favorite places, and it was good to sit back and take a break from things.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. While on the beach, I reread Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends (an excellent writing book), and in the evenings I tinkered a little with a short story in the Star Wanderers universe. I also sent out several short story submissions, and even received a couple of rejections. I’ve got seven stories out on submission right now, and I hope to push that number even higher before the end of the summer.

But short stories aren’t the main focus. The main focus right now is Sons of the Starfarers, specifically, getting Strangers in Flight published. The final draft is currently with my editor, and the cover art is ready to go. Check it out!

I am definitely looking forward to getting this book out. But if you haven’t read the other books in the Sons of the Starfarers series yet, I would advise you to wait until the first omnibus comes out. I should have that up for pre-order by the middle of September, and I’ll price it slightly lower than all three books put together.

I’m not sure when the fourth book will be out. At this point, all I have is a rough outline. However, I expect that it will be out before Christmas. I don’t think it will take more than a couple of months to write, and I’m really excited to write the fifth book, so once I get started I expect it will go quickly. The title for book four is Friends in Command, and it will be primarily from Mara’s point of view.

That just about does it for now. I’d better get back to packing so that I can get some sleep before the night is over. Take care!

Thoughts after finishing The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara

WOW.

This was an amazing book. A highly memorable book. A book I will return to again and again in the future.

There comes a moment when reading a truly amazing book when you don’t think that it can possibly get any better. It’s a ten out of ten, easily five stars. And then … it gets even better.

The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara was one of those books. It’s the third book in a trilogy that technically starts with Gods and Generals, but really it started with the middle book, The Killer Angels, which was written by the author’s father, Michael Shaara.

The Killer Angels covers the events of the Battle of Gettysburg, and is definitely one of the best Civil War novels ever written. Years later, Jeff Shaara decided to write a prequel to his father’s book, showing all the events of the war leading up to Gettysburg. The Last Full Measure picks up immediately where The Killer Angels leaves off, and follows the war to its conclusion at Appomattox and the beginning of the Reconstruction.

This book is amazing. It really made me feel like I was there, from the bloody confusion at the Wilderness to the brutal hand-to-hand combat at Spotsylvania, from Grant’s terrible mistake at Cold Harbor to the long, hard siege of Petersburg. And then, at the very end, when Brigadier General Lawrence Chamberlain surveyed the monuments from Little Round Top just before the fiftieth reunion of Gettysburg, I realized that I actually have been there!

It was such a crazy moment, to read about something in a novel and then have it merge with my own memories of the place. It made the whole thing come alive in a way that was just fantastic.

There were a lot of other amazing moments in the book. When General Lee finally surrendered, it very nearly brought me to tears. And later, when Chamberlain accepted the arms of the Army of Northern Virginia and had his men salute the Confederate soldiers in a show of brotherhood and respect, it was amazingly touching.

Chamberlain’s storyline in general was fascinating throughout the whole trilogy. His father wanted him to be a soldier and his mother wanted him to be a priest, but he chose a career in academia instead at the insistence of his wife. But the academic lifestyle left something unfulfilled in him, and he didn’t realize it until the war broke out. He volunteered without telling anybody, not even his wife, and was soon swept up in some of the bloodiest battles in the war. At Fredericksburg, he spent the night on the bloody fields within sight of the enemy lines, shielded and kept warm by the bodies of his men.

Then, at Gettysburg, there was that was that glorious charge on Little Round Top that saved the Union flank, and quite possibly the entire battle. When he came home from that, he’d gained something that he’d never had before in his life: his father’s respect and approval. From Gettysburg, he rose to command a battalion, but at Petersburg the ineptitude of the Union command left him without support at a critical moment, and he was nearly killed. But he came back, taking command of a brigade upon his recovery, and turned the tide of battle at Five Forks and Appomattox.

By the time the war was over, not only had he won great honor and glory, he’d tested and proven himself, learned something about his inner character that he would always take with him, and that would always give him strength. The afterword starts with a quote from Lawrence Chamberlain that sums it all up amazingly well:

War is for the participants a test of character; it makes bad men worse and good men better.

I’m not going to lie: this book almost made me wish that I could go off to war like Chamberlain did. It’s not that Jeff Shaara glorified the Civil War war–just the opposite, in fact. The horrors and brutality and awful tragedy were all depicted in full measure, with the pain and death and suffering. It wasn’t glamorized at all. But there’s something deep, something primal about going through an experience like that–something that strips away all the luxuries, all the securities of modern life and forces you to find out who you really are, what you’re really made of. For all the horrors that those soldiers went through, I envy them for that part of their experience.

I feel like I’ve been channeling that recently in some of my short stories, like that orc story I wrote recently. I have an idea for another one that I’ll probably write while I’m out at Cape Cod. It’s also what drives me to heroic fantasy, to stuff like David Gemmell’s Drenai series. There’s something about taking up a sword, or an ax, or a musket and charging headlong into battle that rouses the spirit–that makes you feel truly alive.

I would love to write a book as good as this one; it’s one of those things that I dream of. I’m not sure if it’s possible to pull off a story as tremendous as this in short story or novella form, though. Maybe, but all of the stories that have had this powerful of an impact on me were all novels. The shortest one that I can remember was The High King by Lloyd Alexander, but that was the fifth book in a series (and it was still a novel). Short stories and novellas are great, but at some point I need to return to novels.

In any case, those are some of my thoughts after reading The Last Full Measure. There were a lot more, but this post is already starting to ramble so I’ll cut it short here. I’ll leave you with the opening credits from the movie Gods and Generals, a great piece that really captures what so many of the common soldiers were fighting for: home.

Take care and be well.

The week from hell

That might be a bit of an overstatement, but this week is shaping up to be really crazy stressful.

First, I’ve got to move out of my current apartment. I think I’ve got a place lined up to move to, when makes things a lot less stressful than they were last week, but I’ve still got to physically move my stuff, clean up my apartment, handle all that stuff, etc.

Second, because of the move, I’ve got a serious cash flow problem until the end of the month. My current apartment won’t send me the deposit until thirty days after I move out, but I’ve still got to pay a deposit and first month’s rent in my new place, so … yeah.

Third, my book sales have unfortunately hit the summer slump–that, or they seem to have fallen off of a cliff. It’s hard not to panic when that happens. If I were better at marketing, this probably wouldn’t be happening, but unfortunately I am not. So I guess I’ll just have to write and publish my way out of it.

Fourth, however, I’m going on vacation with my girlfriend next Monday, and we’ll be gone for two weeks. That means no new releases until at least the end of the month, and not a whole lot of writing either. Which means that I need to get the revisions of Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III) done before going on vacation, or at least on the train ride out there, in order to send it to my editor in time for a late August / early September release.

Fifth, my phone died today, only to come back from the dead about an hour later. It was extremely weird: at first, my calls wouldn’t go through, then they would go through, but I wouldn’t hear anything, then I could only hear something if my headphones were plugged in, then after going into “settings” and hitting “activate phone,” everything works fine. But wow, did that give me a panic.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. Which is not to say that I’m complaining, just that you’re probably not going to hear much from me for a while. I was hoping to release Strangers in Flight this month, but I’ve got to deal with these other things first, so it’s probably going to be pushed back a bit (though definitely not more than a month).

In any case, I’m keeling over from exhaustion over hear, so that’s enough for now. Later!