In which I become a publisher
People ask me regularly if I have books available on the Kindle. It’s possible that happens more to me than to other authors, since I live and work in Amazon’s home town and my friends are tech geeks. I’m pretty sure that my novels will find their way there eventually through my publisher, Tor Books, but I decided to put a few short stories on the Kindle myself after hearing that other writer’s are having success.
So I enlisted my trusty and helpful web expert, Jeremy Tolbert, in the project, and within a week or so there were three stories up there. Here’s what I chose:
“Savant Songs” which is about a brilliant autistic scientist and is my most commercially successful short story (It came out in Analog and in Year’s Best SF10)
“A Lingering Scent of Bacon,” which got me my best-ever acceptance letter fron editor Kerrie Hughes, and which came out in the anthology “Maiden, Matron, Crone.”
“The Licit Zone,” which is a “Kindle Original.”
This is completely an experiment. I don’t expect to get rich from it. But I like the idea that it keep the first two stories available since they are otherwise pretty hard to find right now, and I like them both. Maybe releasing one only on the Kindle will have interesting side-effects. Who knows.
Each story is a $1.99. From your Kindle, you can find them by searching for my name in the Kindle Store. Just for fun, I want to encourage you to buy one of the stories, read it, and comment back here (good, bad, neutral…I’m open). I’ll draw one to three names (depending on how many people try a story) and send each of you a free copy of “The Silver Ship and the Sea,” which is the beginning of my current series of books.
Someone reading my work to me
At this stage of my writing career, I’ve gone through a number of the fabulous firsts. I’ve sold my first story, and my first novel, had my first awful review and my first stellar one. I’ve won my first award, and I’ve taught writing for the first time. These are things I’ll remember. Well, today was another first - hearing a piece of my fiction professionally podcast at starship sofa. It was quiet lovely to listen to my words being read out loud to me from my ipod. Thanks to Tony and Grant at the Starship Sofa for producing this. This is a piece of flash fiction called “A Hand and Honor” that first appeared in Nature Magazine.
I am also going to have a podcast come out at Escape Pod soon. Both markets I didn’t even know about a few years ago and didn’t contemplate the technology for a decade ago. Isn’t this a lovely time to be a writer?
2Xcreative: Maid Born of Crone
Kyle Cassidy started it. Actually, for me, the trail started with a picture of Neil Gaiman’s dog. I can’t actually find the post that started it all, but it’s probably back there in the history on Neil’s blog. He has a very pretty dog. Anyway, the picture of Neil (also pretty) with the pretty dog sent me to the photographer, Kyle Cassidy. Kyle started 2Xcreative - a pairing of creative people who had never met before from all over the world to commit joint creation. He gave us all a month.
I got paired with photographer Clint Weathers who does some very cool stuff. He is the only person I know with a daily phlogiston. Really. Anyway - check out his site. And even better, check out what we did together - a marriage of picture, poem and prose. Look at the picture first, and then think about what it brings up — it’s a lovely shot that gave me about fifty ideas.
Please free to comment on my website or on Clint’s lj (since for some reason my wordpress to lj posts seem to show up uncomentable). And if you have access to lj (livejournal), the whole 2Xcreative project si worth looking at. I suspect a google or bing search will turn up a lot of it.
And I was at the Locus Awards where Neil got his award for the Graveyard Book (best YA book), and he wasn’t. That’s the sort of circular thing that happens to writers in the small sf and f community.
So thanks to Kyle, Neil, and Clint. And no, I’ve never expressly met any of them, except Neil in a crowd once at a con.
Locus Awards and Science Fiction Hall of Fame Report
Kudos to the Locus team for organizing an excellent event. I had a great time, and enjoyed this year’s awards even more than last year’s. A couple of highlights:
- Most of the winners were there. So were a lot of the nominees. That was very nice. It’s a lot more fun to see someone win an award than to see an award accepted bysomeone else…it just is. The emotional content is just a better quality.
- The University Bookstore and Locus did a nice job of supporting the signing - many books appeared. I, of course, bought too many. Sigh.
- Connie Willis did a nice job as the emcee.
- We have a huge science fiction community in Seattle, and a lot of them showed up.
- Watching Connie get her award was really touching. She gives good speech, and by the end a few of us were crying. All of the Hall of Fame ceremony was nice, of course.
- I had a fun conversation with Frank R. Paul’s grandson, who accepted his award for him (but since Frank R. Paul is dead, he can be easily forgiven for missing the induction). But we talked about the need for positive science fiction and the power of spiritual science fiction and the magic that certain places seem to have. He is from Taos, which is on my list of magical places.
The honorees have always been talked up and shown off in the Sky Church at the SFM, and this year we ended up in the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel (a fine hotel, but NOT the Sky Church). I do hope it moves back to the dressy SFM event next year - this felt kind of disrespectful to people like Connie and Michael who have given us all so much. All we could give them back was a hotel meeting room? Perhaps next year….
Most of my pictures came out marginal, but I posted some of the better shots.
Hope to see some of you at the Locus Awards this weekend
I will be at the autographing, and probably staying through the induction of the honorees into the SF Hall of Fame. There will be a lot of us there - I count at least 16 writers!
See you at the Lake Union Courtyard Marriott.
Why I am Green for Iran
I bought green shirts and I am wearing them. I have turned my twitter icon temporarily green. I keep getting up from the middle of other tasks and checking on events in Iran, even though I am usually far more disciplined. But I thought I should write down some reasons since my family asked, and since it’s useful rumination.
- The futurist in me is totally fascinated by the role social media and worldwide transparency are playing.
- The writer is fascinated by the stories and raw emotion. Everyone is emotional. I cried when I saw Neda’s death. How pointless.
- The American in me does not believe religion and government should be all mixed up together. Both are better and stronger if separated.
- Watching the unrest in Iran is being part of something, perhaps something big, that is happening in the world.
- There is a bit of adrenaline in this. Just being honest.
- I am hopeful for positive change. Ahmadinejad with nukes is scary. I would like Iran to be a country I am not afraid of.
- (And I think this is the biggest one for most Americans) - I believe in freedom, and I believe that freedom needs honest elections. If - at the core - that is what the Iranians are fighting for, it is worth it to me.
- I have found Iran interesting since I read two books. One was “Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi” and the other was “The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan“
Some things I am not “For”
- Formal government action by the US. This is not ours to solve. It would probably backfire. Read some of the posts at the Tehran Bureau if you don’t agree - they are in first person and more eloquent than I could be on this subject. We can help and we can cheer, we can retweet and write, but there is no other useful role for us.
- I am not particularly “for” Mousavi. Nor against him. My vote is irrelevant on this issue, as it should be.
I hope my support is useful to even a few Iranians, or that it helps keep the attention here on the events there. This is worth watching and helping where we can, as individuals.
What do you think?
Twitter: A Trail of Transparent Breadcrumbs
I have been thinking about transparency, social media, and government accountability for a while. At the FiRe conference in San Diego, I ran into fellow sf writer and contrarian, David Brin, who authored the non-fiction book, The Transparent Society. This book made a difference in the way I think about government and life, and has made me a firm believer in the idea that transparency begets accountability.
As a futurist, I knew a long time ago that the Internet would be the doorway to the future. I just didn’t know how that doorway would open. Ten years ago I felt the insemination of Twitter and YouTube and FaceBook, but I could not have told you what they’d look like. I might have guessed a few of the features of FaceBook, but Twitter has been a true wildcard. Instead of simply providing hyperlinks between the static bits of information, the overlapping concentric circles of followers that tweet and re-tweet are linking human hearts and minds across the globe.
That’s a powerful thing.
The current obvious example is the unrest in Iran. Anyone in the world with an interest has been able to easily discover events that would have been fairly easily kept far more secret ten or twenty years ago, and in realtime. Video is linked to as soon as it is posted, and retweets its way around the globe in what looks like minutes. The tweets coming from and about Iran (primarily #iranelection, but many more) are helping to force accountability on the regime in Iran. It’s too early to tell how this story will play out, but it is clear that social media has been a player.
Before we leave the subject of Iran, right after the protests started in Iran, many twitterers put pressure on CNN to provide coverage (see #CNNfail). That’s the pressure of the popular stream on a third estate company.
Some of our largest retailers have had the transparent breadcrumbs of Twitter work against them as well. Or Take the #amazonfail slapping-about that happened within hours of people discovering that sales rankings on GLBT books were being dropped. Amazon is being fussed at on social media networks as I write this because it appears that a book from Amazon can only be re-downloaded a set (and smallish) number of times. But we have to re-download every time we see it on a different device or even update our kindle technology. My guess? That will change. Amazon will have to answer for the consequences whether intended or not, and it will choose a more consumer-friendly business practice.
I just gave a talk in Memphis Tenessee. The topic got away from me a little - shifting from the future to social networking. Everyone (me included) appears to be fascinated by that topic. After the talk, a photographer came up to me and said that social networks have built his business, and that he hoped the people would take what I had said to heart. I have sold stories on Twitter, to be distributed by Twitter, and even for print magazines because I was toe–deep in the stream of Twitter at the right moment.
I’ve been trying to figure out a better government model for our times (I’m an sf writer - my mind does weird things). I think giving all of the people a way to talk immediately to anyone else who wants to listen may be a lynchpin setting tool for stories as I work this out in my head.
Twitter does not appear to have a traditional business model. But maybe a primary value of social networks is in the peace, properity, and accountability they bring to the world. Maybe its in the trail of transparent breadcrumbs we drop for each other across cyberspace in 140 character bursts.
Bobcat - as seen from my parent’s deck
This is the bobcat my mom spotted yesterday. It was lying in a little safe spot in the ravine right next to my parent’s house, and graciously allowed us to watch it and photograph it from the upper deck for about twenty minutes before it wandered off. Photo credit to my dad, who had his camera ready.
It saw us; from time to time it looked up and kind of nodded and twitched its short tail. We apparently did not present a threat. Smart cat.
The neighborhood birds saw it and screeched at it from a safe distance. They were very funny. The rabbits generally remained in hiding although one little guy got pretty close and then froze dead still. Eventually a bird distracted the cat and the bunny moved, and then the cat moved.
Reading Recommendation: Bloodhound (The Legend of Beka Cooper, Book 2
This is the second in Tamora Pierce’s excellent YA series about a fantastical keeper of the peace in the realm of Tortall. You’ll have to venture into the YA shelves to find it. Frankly, some of the best sf and fantasy adventure is there these days, by the way.
This book is told through the journal entries of young, precocious Cooper, who has just earned her stripes to be a real dog (translate here as cop). The language and world-building are lovely, the characters people you’d like to know, and the interrelationships between them perfectly complex. Not to mention the series is darned entertaining. Start with the first one, though. Highly recommended
When Reaching an Audience is Hard
I talked to the good folks at the National Association of Consumer Shows this morning in Memphis Tennessee. I walked away feeling as if I did a good job but not a great job. I did talk to quite a few of them individually and I enjoyed a nice barbecue lunch with a convention goer, and they were easy to talk with in that context. But as a room full of people, it felt tough. In trying to figure that out I came up with two theories — one is undoubtedly true: I could be more polished as a speaker. But hey that’s practice, and the talk today was more practice. So I get to own a piece of it for sure. I think the other bit is that these are people who have been bit hard by the recession. That came through in almost every individual conversation I had. Their business is selling to consumers, and attending an auto show or a home show or a flower show or a car show are all optional. Their success is closely tied to consumer confidence. That’s returning. But it’s returning slowly. And frankly, it’s still bad. I think it’s really, really tough to look forward when your business is tied to something that’s just not that healthy for the moment. Oh, we’ll pull out, and so will they. These are creative, smart people. But it was a good reminder for me that there is still a long pull up to economic excitement.
Some people came up afterwards to tell me they appreciated my optimism, so the core message was there. We do all have to change this together.
Two other observations:
- The most animated part of the the discussion was about social networking. Of course, that’s what everyone is talking about.
- Memphis is the deep south. I hadn’t really realized it until I got there. Southern hospitality runs deep, and it seemed like everywhere I went in the hotel (the downtown Marriott), staff were bending over backwards to help.
