Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Link of the day: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (or see the luvly interview)

I was feeling sorry for the mid-list authors in my last entry, but since then I’ve realized that I never buy their books anyway. My primary source of reading material is the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. I find them more than adequate for non-fiction, though their sci-fi collection leaves something to be desired.

To supplement my sci-fi diet, I buy used books at local independent bookstores. My third source is Buck-a-Book, a local chain that sells remaindered books. Sometimes I’ll experiment with an unfamiliar mid-list type there, but authors don’t get royalties on either used or remaindered books so I’m not helping them any.

Only in unusual cases will I buy a book new, because even the paperbacks are insanely expensive compared to free books from the library or cut-rate ones from my other sources. When I do shell out the big bucks, it’s either to give away a book I think is amazing or to read something I feel is a significant lacuna in my sf knowledge. In both cases, the author is likely to be someone famous and Nebula-winning, not mid-list.

When I say “insanely expensive,” I mean it. There’s no excuse for the price of books today. The technology hasn’t changed in decades, if not centuries, so why has the price of paperbacks increased 333% in the last 20 years? Consider, for example, A Princess of Mars, first published in All-Story in 1912 and now out of copyright and freely available from Project Gutenberg. The tan Ballantine paperback edition cost $1.25 in 1973. A later printing with the Michael Whelan cover cost me $1.95 new circa 1982. That same book now lists for $6.50 at Amazon.

There are eleven books in the Mars series alone. When I was a kid with, obviously, no income, I begged or bought the Mars books, the Venus series (5 books ranging in price from $1.95 to $2.50, depending on the size and the year obtained) and assorted other ERB books, mostly new though even at that tender age I kept an eye out for used copies. So, say, 25 books averaging $2 a pop, for a total of $50. Today the 11 Mars books alone would cost me about $75, and the others are available only in “commemorative” editions averaging $15 a pop. The total is now pushing $300.

The industry will have to pardon me if I believe that $300 is too much to pay for pulps in the public domain. And no matter how promising your mid-list novel is, you’re probably not worth $25 hardcover or $8 paperback to me, either. The library is free. Project Gutenberg is free. Fanfic is free. Even television is free.

Most readers probably aren’t as cheap as I am, but I figure that if you have a heavy reading habit like I do then you have to find cheaper sources, and you’re likely to use those non-royalty sources for mid-list books. If, on the other hand, you’re not a heavy reader then you can spring for the occasional $10, $15 or $25 book. But what sort of book is that likely to be - something obscure in the mid-list, or a bestseller being heavily marketed by the publisher?

There’s this article on Salon at the moment about the trials and tribulations of being a mid-list author. Since you have to register or watch an interminable ad to read it, let me summarize: Jane Austen Doe got a $150,000 advance on her first novel, but now she’s suffering the slings and arrows of mid-listing. I’m playing a tiny violin…

The mid-list is either everything not on the best-seller lists, or anything the publisher chooses not to promote. Katherine Sutcliffe has some advice for getting from mid-list to best-seller list - to summarize, author, promote thyself. Jane Austen Doe has tried that, too, but rightly believes that promotion is the publisher’s job.

The trouble in the mid-list seems to be that the publishing industry is undergoing a shift from producing to gambling. Publishers want new authors who just might be the next J. K. Rowling, not a mid-list full of break-even propositions. It’s a shame, but it’s no surprise - plenty of other industries have gone down this road. For example, the WB cancels a mid-list show like Angel, and Fox doesn’t even have the decency to cancel Boston Public before breaking the set, even though there are no solid prospects on the horizon to replace them. The networks are after a sudden windfall, not a good lineup, and why should the publishers be any different? It’s about the stock value rather than pulping it out to all comers like in the good old days before television.

To be fair to my genre, I don’t get the impression that this gambling impulse is the norm for sci-fi, perhaps because the chance of any sf novel becoming a blockbuster is negligible. Maybe a fantasy writer will strike it rich once every couple of decades or so, but not sf.

Sometimes bloggers are after the big windfall, too, and when they find they’re not going to be the next Instapundit, they stop blogging. I found that link on dive into mark, who also has some interesting things to say about writers not improving and a nice passage from Tom Stoppard about putting the right words in the right order.

As a mid-list blogger, I try to avoid politics and personal stuff unless I can make it especially amusing. For me, the primary purpose of communication is amusement - political indignation is as boring as the state of your digestive tract. Like Brent Simmons and Daniel Green, I wish literary bloggers would talk about literature more and politics less, but this problem is by no means limited to lit blogs. I wish geek bloggers would stick to the geeking and fan bloggers would get back to the meta.

Just today I had to unsubscribe from Aaron Swartz because I couldn’t take the politics anymore. I vaguely recall his having something to say of geeky interest, but that was so long ago now that I’ve given up on him. Maybe he’ll recover after the election. And I have to say, Electrolite’s days in the “Writing” folder of my RSS reader are numbered. If it were funny [warning: offensive humor] that would be one thing, but it’s just politics.

I don’t necessarily mean that a blog should have only one topic - mine has 20 or so - but whenever you’re trying to communicate, you should have your audience in mind. If they came to your blog because you’re the big web standards guru, you can assume that they feel the same way you do about CSS, but not about Bush. People are interested in you for what sets you apart from the other 100,000 bloggers, and that’s probably not your political opinions.

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Since my Dvorak typing is only slowly improving, I thought I’d get more practice by importing a nicer lesson set into gtypist. Dan Wood of ABCD fame let me use his lessons, and once I found the gtypist manual and especially the emacs mode, making a new .typ file was easy.

I’m not sure how to handle distribution yet, but feel free to email me at webmaster [at] jemimap.cjb.net if you want a copy.

It’s that time of year again; my Writers of the Future rejection arrived today. I thought this story was better than my last one, but it did worse. I have two weeks to come up with something new for the next deadline.

In some disturbing publishing news, some print-on-demand publishers have lost a patent suit. IANAL, but I just don’t see how something as simple and intuitive as print-on-demand is patentable.

Manip of the day: new Kerry campaign poster by Randal Robinson

I’ve been finding more of interest to vote for in the ASC Awards than I was expecting. I have only a handful of TNG stories left to read, and then I’ll be on break until VOY. Today I commented on Ventura33’s Letting Down the Race (the html is a little messed up, but the whole story is there), which reminded me of Greg Egan’s Distress and led me to the Aspergia site.

When you come down to it, Aspergia is about more than treating the abnormal as a legitimate alternative. It’s not a political battle over a minor abberation like sexual preference. It’s a whole aliens-in-our-midst thing - it’s the Neanderthals against the Cro-Magnons. And they’re multiplying like something out of science fiction. They’re smarter than us (they have Einstein and Edison, we have Bush and Bennifer), yet less warlike. What happens when they decide they’ve had enough of our foolishness? To see if you’ll be part of the new ruling class, take the AQ test.

Yes, I’m being facetious. The more likely outcome is that sometime soon we’ll start fixing all these little genetic abnormalities. There will be no more Einsteins, Edisons, or Queer Eyes for Straight Guys.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
And days of auld lang syne, my dear,
And days of auld lang syne.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

I’ve been voting a bit in the ASC Awards for auld lang syne. I don’t watch ENT or DS9, so I’ve mostly skipped those categories. There’s some TNG by Lori and Alara I missed this year, and the whole category is quite small so I’m going through it now. Things won’t really heat up until the weeks of TOS and VOY, which somehow got scheduled together.

Many of the old Trek people are nowhere to be found in this year’s awards, and so far nothing has gotten the dried-up Trek fic juices running again. Retirement suits me just fine, thanks.

I saw this article on CNN yesterday, but I didn’t mention it because it was just too eerie. Today, however, Mark Steyn said precisely what I was thinking in his column: that the Spanish people just let al Qaeda elect their government for them.

That’s not what I intended to blog about today. I’d found a cool quote by Bertrand Russell:

No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.

Unlike Russell, I wasn’t going to claim that sin is a wholly pernicious idea. The trouble is that people insist on moralizing issues that are not moral in nature. They don’t scold their cats or their cars, but they will scold corporations, political parties or entire nations - and yet your dog has more of a moral sense than the average corporation.

So I will not scold Spain. Spain is not a moral agent but a symptom that Europe still hasn’t gotten over WWI. Looking around today, we find ourselves in a nightmare house where the clocks all stopped on the eve of an unthinkable disaster. It is 1928 all over again. –The Roots of European Appeasement by David Gelernter, September 2002. Here’s some more:

As the Second World War and its aftermath fade, they reveal a “new world order” that is strangely familiar–amazingly like the Western world of the 1920s, with its love of self-determination and loathing of imperialism and war, its liberal Germany, shrunken Russia, and map of Europe crammed with small states, with America’s indifference to Europe and Europe’s disdain for America, with Europe’s casual, endemic anti-Semitism, her politically, financially, and masochistically rewarding fascination with Muslim states who despise her, and her undertone of self-hatred and guilt.

I’ve had politics on the brain for my NaNoEdMo novel. Seema spotted me a lovely link about Massachusetts liberals:

Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe thinks the prototype of the M.L. stereotype was first identified around Concord in the 19th century. Back before San Francisco was even a gold rush village, Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionists. “The downside is that they made their criticisms in a pious and haughty manner with great contempt to anyone who disagreed,” says Wolfe.

I admit, the haughty manner and great contempt get annoying after a while, but what really bothers me is the fear and loathing. An example of the former is the prevalent and irrational fear that unnamed Republicans are about to turn the country into something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. An example of the latter is violent hatred of President Bush, though the most offensive thing about him as an individual is his inability to form sentences in his native tongue.

The only people I fear are people who fear people. You never know what someone with an irrational fear of you will do to you or your rights in order to assuage that fear. Far worse, though, is the way “they scare me” is used to squelch rational debate about issues or candidates. Scary is shorthand for so bad that I don’t have to explain why.

On the other hand, I don’t hate the haters. They usually hate public figures rather than entire classes of citizens into which I could easily fall, so they don’t pose a particular political danger to me. Also, their virulence is disarming - you can spot them foaming at the mouth from quite a distance and you know they’re not going to have anything new or challenging to say.

It’s fine if you want to be an irrational Bushophobe; it’s even intermittently entertaining for the rest of us. But it’s not debate - it’s piety. That’s par for the course here, just as other pieties are in vogue in other states.

Occupied territory of the day: al-Andalus

I’m back from the deep, dark swamps of Southeastern Massachusetts. I got a ride home, so now I have a leftover “get out of Fall River free” card (otherwise known as a return ticket) from Bonanza Bus Lines. They should be paying me to go there. But I digress…

I don’t usually think about the feedback I’m not getting, but when my site stats came back up recently after months of being AWOL for an upgrade I was surprised all over again at just how little feedback people send when they think I’m not looking. My standard estimate is 1% feedback - that is, one piece of email per 100 readers - but that estimate is a bit high. In some cases the rate is more like 1 in 500, or 1 in 1000. My latest story has received not a single feedback out of over 200 hits, and it was a good story, if I do say so myself.

So I started wondering, how can it be that some people get so much feedback they don’t have time to answer it, and other people get nothing? To what, exactly, does an order of magnitude more feedback correspond - a name that’s an order of magnitude bigger? An army with ten minions for every one of mine? Ten fan friends for each of mine? A story that’s ten times better?

To answer that question, I’d have to know where all that feedback was coming from. There are two kinds of feedback in the fan world: potlatch fb and unsolicited fb. If you know that certain actions (such as posting to a mailing list) will inevitably bring you feedback no matter the quality of the fic, you can assume the fb is potlatch. On the other hand, if you post a story anonymously (say, in a blind contest) and get feedback for it, that’s unsolicited feedback. Everything in between is suspect. And if you hardly know with your own fic whether the feedback you get is spontaneous or a result of a complex network of fannish obligations and feedback guilt, how can you know what the BNF’s are getting?

It’s almost impossible to get an honest piece of fb in fandom. Even newbies get fb that’s intended to rope them into the potlatch rather than express how the reader really felt about their fic. People who aren’t involved in the potlatch generally don’t send any feedback at all. They’re going to archives and reading your fic and you never even know.

Sure there are rec sites, contests, and the occasional slightly picky archive, but there are no real rewards for quality the way there are for quantity. (Anyone who thinks fb numbers are a reflection of quality should take a look around fanfiction.net.) Fb is just one of the many rewards for quantity.

On this day in 1938, German troops entered Austria. At our comfortable distance here in the US, the Anschluß is most familiar to us in its musical form from The Sound of Music, where the impression is that the good Captain will not live under fascism.

The truth is that Austria was already fascist in 1938; it was only the flag with the spider on it (in musical terms) that changed. The issue was sovereignty, not freedom - nationalism, not Naziism. [The reader may insert the obvious comments about the EU here.] In musicals, at least, nationalism is still a virtue.