So sorry to be so late with this, but I came home to a pile of stuff that needed to be done.  Yes, there were other reasons for my cutting short the Texas trip, reasons having to do with family stuff (no, nothing horrible) but here’s the thing – even without that staying away for two weeks would be inadvisable. Because I’d come home to two weeks of stuff that needed done, and not just house stuff (where the guys do pitch in, if often not well) but business correspondence, cover art to evaluate, contacts with editor doing Witchfinder, stuff that needs to be put up — that sort of thing.  Oh, yeah, and working on novel for delivery.

Which brings the question again, when did we all get so busy?

I was talking to my sons yesterday, and all of their friends (and they too, if in odd freelance areas) are doing thirty things at once.  Two part time jobs, more than full time studying, and a couple of volunteer gigs on the side because it’s something they want to do.

Okay, I’m a terrible example of this, because I took a full load in college, took private language classes on the side on stuff the college didn’t offer and taught part time.  But that’s not how the movies show my generation.  It certainly isn’t how movies show their generation.

There’s a bit of selection bias there, granted, and granted, they know people doing half time in college, and then spending the rest of the day getting baked or playing computer games.  But these aren’t their friends.

Among my friends, too, I can only come up with one, off the top of my head, who has only one “regular” job and nothing else.  I will grant you selection bias.  Being a writer is sort of like being an actress in Los Angeles.  Half the waiters you know are really “actors” too, and then there’s the girl down at the copyshop, who’s hoping to be discovered.

Of course a lot of the people I know are… whatever they are and indie writers or aspiring writers on the side.  But even taking away that component, most of them have third jobs too, something that brings in “a little cash” – whether it’s doing the accounting for a company, the research for another, or more homely stuff like office work for a friend on the off hours, or crafts you sell on the side, or… both for cash of which we are all short, even those of us working like crazy, what with the price of everything always going up, and for well… when we’re working we’re not reading the news. Right?  It serves a purpose.  It could be argued my younger self took those extra courses because the labor market in the late seventies in Portugal was tighter than a miser’s purse and also because being so stupidly busy kept me from worrying.

But all the same, when did we all get so busy?  And where are the people who must – perforce – be doing nothing?

To an extent this is the evolution of the “job”.  I remember in my parents’ day a job was something you got and you stayed on until you got your retirement party and your retirement.  There were signs of anxiety about that model before I left elementary.  My brother’s generation, ten years older than I, all seemed to be getting “gigs” to “make do.”  Six months here, and they let you go before they were stuck with you for life (European labor regs are fun.)  People would do six months as teachers, six months as mechanics, and then rotate to working in an office for six months.  The jobs that remained sinecures were either government or “someone got me this job because my uncle owns the company.”

Coming to the states after college didn’t seem to make much difference for those prospects.  All of our friends were getting temporary jobs.  And honestly, throughout our working lives, except mine, which is of course weirder than that being a freelancer, all our jobs have been “a few years.”

Part of this is how industry changes.  Dan has worked all over the place.  So have I, when forced to get honest jobs.  In my case, I’ve ranged from retail to a chemical plant, to colleges.  Nothing is permanent, and you really don’t expect your employer to have any loyalty to you, so you don’t really consider yourself bound to stay with them for life.

In fact, most of my generation has suffered more or less prolonged bouts of unemployment.  We’ve been lucky and ours have been minimal, though we have this thing that if I’m having trouble selling (so far only ONE dead year, back in 02/03) it will be at the same time Dan is laid off.  Because misery loves company, I guess.  We’re speshul that way.  Never mind.  I’d rather get my misery over intense and quick than light and prolonged.

But now, and yes, partly through the completely stupid law that shall not be mentioned, we seem to be parting ways with the full time job, even the temporary one.  Or the full time job just doesn’t pay enough.  Or it’s shakier than a guy who guzzles whiskey for breakfast.  Or whatever… and then people have these “I also do this—”

Is it a great strategy?  Oh, heck yes.  One of my friends who was laid off stands a good chance of replacing his traditional income with income from his other sources, just amped up a little.  And of course, he now has more time to pursue them.

But time is the thing.  I mean, I’ve not got to the place I was in college, where I slept only on Saturday (– and slept like sixteen hours.  The rest of the week I made do with two hour catnaps per night.  Good thing I haven’t got to that point.  I don’t think I could survive a month of that, much less four years, at my age.) but I dream – DREAM – of taking two days off and just sleeping and reading.

It’s a pipe dream.

Heck, take the Texas trip: when I started going there, five? Years ago to teach the workshop at Bedford Library, we thought “Why not cut it so it’s two weeks, and I can attend Fencon.”  And it worked fine.  Oh, I didn’t work on schedule while there, but that was okay.  I could take the weeks to read and research and work around the edges.

Objectively, I was doing a maximum of three novels a year, blogging once a week (if that) and maybe doing five short stories a year.

This year, for good or ill, I seem to be on the short-a-month treadmill, and of course I blog for PJM, and blog here every day, and I’m trying for at least four novels trad and a couple indie a year (not that I’ve done great at that) plus I’m working with Goldport at bringing out my backlist, and I’m doing cover design for Naked Reader (and man, is that a steep slope) and because of all my new duties, I’m taking classes and…

And if I take a day or two off, I end up having to make it up, so taking time off NOT worth it.

Of course, this is also the fault of technology.  Not that way.  It’s obvious that when technology makes it easier to work from home and to learn new trades part time, the ones who will do it are not the ones who are doing nothing, but the strivers, the already over busy, the chronically curious and insatiably interested – us, in fact.

And all my friends – except those who are ill — are the same – when they’re not worse.

So, when did we all get so busy?

This is a question a friend asked.  She said “So, traditional publishing is dying and we all thought we’d be vegging in front of the TV and instead we’re all going crazy.  When did we all get so busy?”

When indeed?  And how?

Atlas isn’t shrugging.  Atlas has taken a part time job lifting Jupiter and Mercury, and he’s juggling all the asteroids on the weekend.

Is it useful?  Well, it gives us more skills.  And it can cushion you when the main job falls.  But this resting from a job by doing another, only works for a while, right?  Maybe the completely insane drivers (No, worse than normal.  FAR worse) on Colorado roads these last few months aren’t just because of pot legalization and driving drunk and/or importing Californians.  Maybe they’re all sleeping behind the wheel.

Take me right now.  I have to finish this blog post – late, because I actually crashed and slept 12 hours, last night, perhaps logical after illness/trip/cleaning house and catching up on business stuff yesterday – and then do the post for MGC.  And then I need to do three covers for Naked Reader.  And then I need to get the first two musketeer books in shape to reissue.  And then I have a story that MUST be delivered by Friday.  And somehow there in the middle, I MUST do my posts for lifestyle, since they very kindly put up with my going AWL while sick.

And there’s laundry and dinner and the chores of daily life.

The question I have is – where are those people who aren’t doing this?  Do they exist?  And what do they do all day?  Surely you get tired of watching soaps after a week?  No?

When did we all get so busy?  And where are all those zombies?

UPDATE: a different post is up at Mad Genius Club: A Self-Doubt Called George.

I am home. Today I feel curiously non-verbal, so I apologize for the disjointed nature of this post.

So, I have proof the airlines are out to get me – all of them.

Okay, it’s not so much proof as the fact that I can’t get anywhere without a cancellation/delay/baggage loss, but on the other hands this seems to happen to everyone who travels to the point a trip without any of those is startling.

Of course this is because our government bails out the airlines when they insult so many customers that people will drive across country rather than fly.  So, what do they learn?  Be inefficient, get more money.

Actually that also relates to our government.

Which reminds me, doom, gloom, horrible things loom: you realize the NSA didn’t read this blog post before I put it up?  How can any country survive such lax ways of handling information?  How can I get used to privacy again?

We must un-shut the government even at the cost of paralyzing all of the economy with the worst law ever written implemented in the worst way possible.  Otherwise, who will make us use toxic-metal shedding lightbulbs?

If you wrote this as a plot, you could never sell it.  The law is demonstrably destroying the economy, yet the party trying to stop it is the one that can’t be blamed for it.  Meanwhile the Frankensteins who cobbled it together are saying “full speed ahead”.

Is it because they think that they’ve got vote fraud SO sewn up they don’t think they have to worry?  Is it because they think the votes of the people hired to administer this three ring circus will out-leverage the rest of the country?  Or is it that they hate us and wish us to collapse?  Or “yes”?

Or is it that they’re stupid.  I mean, really, really stupid.  Lethal levels of stupid?  After all more than one of them has seemed to intimate that in the ideal society everyone works at government make-work jobs.  And yet… there would be food and electricity and everything.  Think on this a while.

Meanwhile?  What if they gave a government shut down and no one noticed?  Other than the contrived instances they want us to notice?

Wall Street didn’t react at all to the shut down.  What does this mean?

We’re too great a nation to have this sclerotic, bizarre and STUPID government.  Let’s continue with our business as if they didn’t exist.

There are two types of people in the world.  Those who want to tell everyone what to do and how to do it, and those who have fond fantasies of holding them under water until bubbles stop coming up.

Okay, I’m probably wrong on this.  That last is just me.  In my camp I count people like Charlie Martin who, despite not being a Christian, has a bit St. Francis serenity to him.  They just want to be left alone, and they will evade anyone trying to force them to do things and do them exactly THEIR way.

The types who want to tell people exactly what to do and how to do it are everywhere.  I grew up in a culture where total strangers would approach you in public, on the street, to tell you that you were wearing your shirt wrong – because it was not the way everyone else would do it.

Being me, I rebelled against everything that people told me I should do, including basic manners which was stupid, because basic manners are simply the way we avoid making everyday situations into horrible confrontation.  Manners are how we avoid beating each other over the last roll at dinner and running into the door all in a bunch and getting all stuck.

Manners unfortunately also stop me waving the middle finger of doom at most idiot pontificators telling you “This is exactly what you should do and how you should do it.”  However the issue needs to be addressed, because if we don’t then these kind of idiots end up getting political power and making it a law that you have to do things their way.

There are things of course that you can only do one way.  Say you suffer from craneo-rectal inversion and want to see the world.  The only way to do it is to pull your head out of its dark, smelly place.

There are other things like that too.  I mean you shouldn’t eat sand or metal.  And at a formal dinner, you shouldn’t eat with your hands.  In general it’s more efficient to eat with your fingers than with your toes.  Though I’ll point out our class president wrote with his toes, because he was a Thalidomide baby.  So even in these basics, there are no hard and fast “How to do it.”

However for most basics, and lacking other impairments, the “how to do it” is agreed on at least by the time you leave high school.

For everything else, can we have people leave us alone already.  Note that the first lady has now found it necessary to tell us to drink more water.  This is relatively innocuous, until some idiot decides to make it into a law, but still – drink more water, really?  You need to put this message out there?  Listen, lady, most of us figured out that drinking gasoline killed you by the time we were two, or at least we took it on faith, plus the smell nauseated us.  As for “but… water… drink more.”  Yeah.  Well, most of us have been hearing that since we were out of knee breeches.  And since I never wore knee breeches and I’m almost the First Nagger’s age, that’s a veeeeeeery long time.

Does she think because it’s her wagging her finger we’ll pay more attention?  Listen, Lady, I’m more likely to listen to my doctor, and I still don’t.  Why not?  Because I hate drinking plain water.  I do it only if I’m really thirsty and there’s nothing else.  (I will drink carbonated water above that, but above those I will drink tea or coffee.  And no, those aren’t the opposite of hydrating.  That’s been disposed of.)  In fact, I only stopped being severely dehydrated when I gave in and started guzzling iced tea.  And yes I knew that I should drink mo’ water, but I couldn’t force myself to.  Because I don’t care who tells me, my back brain doesn’t like it.  (And btw, through most of humans’ history – not pre-history because I can’t be sure – people didn’t drink water, they drank beer or other alcoholic beverages.)

But nowhere is this more annoying than in the arts.  No, seriously.

I’m sick and tired of being told there is only one way to write.  This is only because I’m not a painter or a musician anyway, but yes, I’m tired of it.

You’re going to quote the tribal lays thing, and of course, there’s many ways to construct them, but truly, this doesn’t seem to percolate to people’s heads.

It’s fine by me if you say “Hey, Sarah, you teach writing.  So, clearly you think there is a way.”

I think there is a way to make a story more attractive and popular, yes, and that’s what I teach, though those who’ve taken workshops with me know that I “beg” a lot.  I’ll say things like “don’t start with your character crying, unless you can make it fly.” Etc.  Because though there are certain guidelines to make your way easy everyone can quote three or four major instances of rule breaking that went big.

That one is already bad enough when people come in all big and bad and say “you can’t have first person narration that doesn’t sound amateurish,” which causes me to clear my throat and go “ahem, Heinlein, and smile when you say that.”

But what really gets my goat, gores it and then barbecues it over a pit with hot sauce is the people who tell you HOW to write.  And by that I mean the process of writing.  No, really “You must write on paper, or you’re writing trash” or “you must type everything on an old Remington Selectric” or and this will make some of you grimace “you must revise everything five times – preferably to the tastes of the editor who is the voice from on high and who is NOT paying you until/unless you hit his/her hot spot, before your story is “good”.”

This gets on my nerves for various reasons.  The first is that the little clueless writer I used to be took all this to be gospel truth.  This included using 30 to end my short stories for years because some book told me to.  It included writing short stories, in the first place, because three or four books assured me this is how you broke in.  It included sending to pays in copies first, because I heard you needed those in your resume before the bigs looked at you (not true, and if you had too many of them, no bigger mag would trust you.)

It included my trying to follow all the “rules” of writing, including “don’t use the verb to be” which for a while made my writing very stilted and odd.  Also, I bought all the “you must revise five, seven, ten times” for each story. What happens when I do that – I once took a year to write a SHORT story – is that my stories become absolutely blah.

Until I went to Oregon and people took a look at my unedited stories and didn’t run screaming, I thought I needed this.

Now, am I going to tell you no one needs this?  No, I’m not.  I have friends who revise and polish multiple times and you don’t want to see their first drafts.

Is my process better than theirs?  Oh, hell no.  It’s faster.  That’s a good thing in the current model.  But what it REALLY means is that I’m a LOUSY reviser.  I either hit it off the bat, or not.  But it also means I need to improve by what I call “months of silence” where I study and experiment on pieces no one will ever see, before I am able to start a story “hot” and carry it through to the end readable, without having to revise.

However, for me the “one true way of writing” was a sand trap, which cost me years of livelihood, and years of work.

In the same way everyone saying that to be “really” published you must go through a traditional publisher is going to cost writers years of life, and is also implicitly endorsing a system that had become so dysfunctional it was selecting for “tone” and look of the writer, rather than any quality of the writing.

I love my traditional publisher, but truth be told, they’re not very traditional, and in fact all the other houses rage against how they do business and whom they buy.  And yet, they’re the ones with the most fans on the ground.

I’ve been known to get a discount at my local Home Despot, in CO, because I wrote for Baen, and everyone in the store READ Baen.  This doesn’t happen with any other brand.  But if you hear the other editors, Baen is doing it ALL wrong, because they’re doing it differently.

And ultimately, that’s what matters – nothing succeeds like success.

Should you rewrite multiple times or publish your first drafts?  I don’t know.  I’m not you.  Chances are your head doesn’t work like mine.  I can tell you how I do it, but not how you need to do it.

Should you go indie or try traditional?  You do it how it works for you, and if it doesn’t work you try another one.

But most importantly, you stop trying to impress the newbs with your wisdom and power.  No one gave you the right to tell people how they should do their thing.  If they fail, they’ll soon figure out the other methods.  You can tell them “this is how I do it” because guidance is helpful.

But you don’t get to tell them how to do things and what things they should do, because you don’t know how other people’s mind works, you don’t know your taste is universal, and besides, you’re not the boss of anyone.

You didn’t just come down from the mountain, and I don’t see no stone tablets in your hands.

Let people find their own path.  Advise them if they ask.  Tell them “to publish here and there, I’ve found you have to do this” but stop already with “the only true way.”

Because this is my middle finger.

Oh, yeah, and drink more vodka!

There was a discussion at a forum to which I do not have access right now, on whether indie publishing means you didn’t “make the cut” for traditional.

Sigh.

Do I have to revisit this?  Apparently I do.

If I had the keys to the forum on me – I don’t.  I’m away from home and don’t have access to a lot of stuff from this computer – I’d go in and point out it totally depends on what you’re talking about and what you want to do.

Note right at the onset that I publish both Indie and Baen.  And that a lot of the stuff I intend to do Indie is stuff Baen wouldn’t touch (for its main publishing house, though I’ll try to sell it to webscriptions for those who read that way.)

What is the reason for this divided strategy?

Would I stop publishing with Baen so I can go fully Indie?  Not only no, but h*ll no.  And it’s not just because Baen gives me upfront money, though for a woman with two sons in college this is not sneezable-at (totally a word, shuddup.)

Baen has name recognition, and when you’re a wise, (trust me, on this) Latina, with a degree in literature and various odd opinions, you need that little rocket ship on the spine to convince sane people you’re not another feminist glittery hoo-ha of profound boredom.

Baen, to put it bluntly, takes me where I want to go with far less effort than I would have to employ to get there on my own.

This is because Baen – all praise to Jim Baen and Toni Weisskopf as his successor – has taken great care to build a cohesive brand.  If you like a Baen book, chances are you’ll like the others.  This makes it easy for readers to go “ooh, it has the rocket, I’ll read it.”

Do other brands in science fiction or elsewhere enjoy the same name recognition?  Well, for a while bantam had a reputation as being more high brow than the rest but – nota bene – this was a reputation MOSTLY among writers, not the reading public.  If you ask the reading public if a book is random penguin or Tor or… they’ll look at you blankly, with good reason.

For several years now, the other houses have made it a point of buying and disposing of in two books writers who didn’t miraculously become bestsellers with no publicity and no support, while cultivating and making artificial bestsellers out of a bunch of things with little natural audience.

What this means is that their print runs have shrunk and their trademark does not encourage anyone to buy.

So, let’s suppose you’re not writing something that fits the Baen trademark.  And please, don’t tell me that the Baen trademark is “quality” – yes, it is that, but there’s more to it.  Baen is plot driven fantasy and science fiction.  It can have characters and worldbuilding too, and it usually does, but the Baen brand means a certain… feel.  That’s why it’s a brand.  Look, say The Man In The High Castle, which I like is NOT Baen.  It lacks the pacing or the clarity of plot.  The same for say Dark They Were And Golden Eyed.

As you guys know my random mind can produce Baen stuff and non Baen stuff, including VERY non-Baen stuff: mystery, romance, pseudo-near-literary, whatever.

For years, I gave my non-Baen stuff to other houses (okay sold – waggles hand)  and I’m no longer doing that.  Why not?

Mostly because I wouldn’t trust them – contracts, reporting, etc – further than I could throw them.  I’m waiting till they either pull their heads out of their rearward facing orifices OR go under and something emerges to replace them.

But it’s more than that.  FOR YEARS I worked for them and got ulcers.  If you think there isn’t a political line, you’re nuts.  I had to toe it and keep my mouth shut.  Given the force with which my mouth tends to open – explosively – the unrelieved pressure was giving me falling hair and toenails.  (You only think I’m joking.)

And beyond all that, let’s be honest here, my indie books net me a lot more money in the long run, if not upfront.  So…  What are the other publishers not Baen doing that I should give them that 97% of my potential income?  I’ve already said that at least in my opinion they have no name brand recognition.

So, what are they doing?

Oh, they’re putting on a cover and putting it on shelves.  Um… the first is dubious (is the cover going to be the same for almost every book in the series and make it impossible to find new ones?  Because at least one house did that) and the second any more very iffy, because I once had six books out in one year and not ONE made it onto a bookshop in CO, and that was before the current contraction in shelf space.  And yes, all these books were by major publishers.

So, I bring out my non-Baen stuff indie, and some of it I admit might be Baen stuff, but it’s experimental “let’s throw it at the wall and see if it sticks” stuff like Witchfinder, but marginal enough that I don’t want to metaphorically clog the pipelines with it.  I prefer to send to Baen the books I KNOW they’ll be interested in, like the sequels to DST, or MIGHT be interested in like The Brave And The Free, or MIGHT be interested in like World War Shifter (Hurray for the Red Dragon.)

“But Sarah,” you say “You are a professional.  You sell other novels.”

Sigh.

Guys, the truth is that there are novels of mine I couldn’t give away for love or money and that only sold after my first novel sold.  And then they sold professional.  BUT until I had contacts I couldn’t give them away.

It’s not just QUALITY that sells a book.  It’s hitting at the right time, when you have the book they want.  I have at least one series that didn’t sell to a given publisher because they’d just bought a “similar” one.  If I’d sent it a week before, the other author would have been disappointed.

And I can tell you that the people I’m mentoring now, I recommend they don’t even SUBMIT traditional until they have the kind of book Baen might like.  People like Kate Paulk, or Amanda Green or, yes, Cedar Sanderson.  Or, oh, yeah, my sons.  Because NO ONE deserves the “traditional publishers” (which Baen never was) right now.

In the future, maybe.  But right now are the big bumblers (the big four and the boobsie twins, random-penguin) worth signing away your book for ten years, maybe forever?  Oh h*ll no.  I wouldn’t let my worst enemy sign up with one of the traditional.

But Sarah, you’ll say, isn’t it true that all self-and-indie published books are drek?

Eh.  No more than traditionally published books are all drek.

First of all drek is a highly subjective measure.  Second this is why Kindle (and most of the others) give you samples. You download the sample.  The ABSOLUTE drek in indie, like the absolute drek in slush announces itself on the first paragraph in horrible spelling and terrible formatting.

“But Sarah, I’ll have to go through hundreds of books to find one I like.”  Um… not in my experience.  Look…  Most of the really bad ones don’t stay up there long, or have so many one-star reviews you would only download them for funsies.

So, of the indies you might consider – not all uniformely one star reviews – and in whatever you’re reading at the time (Oh, please.  Sometimes you feel like an elf, sometimes you don’t!) you might have to look at three or four before you find one you want to read and settle in.

Are you going to stand there and tell me to my face that you NEVER in your life went through that many while browsing in a bookstore?  Lying is a sin, you know?

It’s just now the browsing is in your house and in your own time.  And yes, sometimes you’ll buy a dud.  Of COURSE you never did that traditional right?  Which is why there aren’t book-shaped indents on the walls.  (Of course you can’t throw the kindle.  It gets expensive.)

So, is indie all uniformly drek?  Smile when you say that.  A lot of my friends and relatives are mostly indie, or will be (younger son.)  And I think it’s the best decision for them.  And I will read (and finish) their stuff.

Besides, writers like Larry Correia went indie first.  Before anyone bought him.  Does that mean he was Drek?

Oh, please tell him so, and let me take pictures while you do it.  Better, let me take the movie of what Mrs. Correia does to you.  Just YouTube hits would be worth it.

Seriously – if a writer is so lazy he will uniformly cast a lot of good books by the way side because one of the clown car publishers (and no, that doesn’t include Baen) didn’t pick them up… they deserve to be deprived of decent reads.

I yield to no one in my devotion to the Baen imprint both as a writer and a reader.  And maybe someday Baen will publish the world, including Romance and Mystery.  Until then, there’s indie.  And for those odd SF/F that don’t quite fit the Baen imprint, there’s indie.

And this is why I walk between worlds, and I refuse to look down on those who don’t fit the Baen imprint and are making their own way.  They might not be Baen-style, but it doesn’t make them bad quality and heaven knows as a very eclectic reader I find room for them in my reading list.

I completely understand if your ENTIRE reading list is taken up with Baen – a vast portion of mine is – but if you have room for other books outside that particular rubric, consider indie.  There are gems out there, waiting to be discovered.

In case you worry, I’m really a lot better today, but we need to go and pick up Cedar Sanderson from the airport for the workshop… so, I need to be clean and ready to go in a few minutes, and this AND blogging won’t fit into my early morning.

I was talking to Kevin J. Anderson the other day and he was telling me that most people are missing how big the ebook thing was, because even our “old” books largely haven’t been seen outside the states.

The eBook Invasion—Taking over the World One Text File at a Time

The world is about to explode—and I mean that in the best possible way. A major change is happening right now in international reading and book-buying. For most people, this is occurring under the radar, but it’s big.

A friend in the computer gaming industry sees the same thing from her perspective:  Tablet and smartphone games/apps are already booming in the US, Europe, and Asia—but those devices are just starting to catch on internationally. The market hasn’t reached its peak yet, not by a long shot. In fact, international smartphone and tablet use is where the US market was several years ago.

Think way back to, say, 2010 and consider how the US market has boomed in such a short time:  Droids, iPads, iPhones, Galaxy Tablets, Slates, Nexus, and countless clones are ubiquitous.  One-third of American adults have tablets and over half own a smartphone.

And the potential market in Asia could be even larger.  According to my insider friend, the gaming industry is holding its breath, waiting for the Asian market to reach a critical mass when everyone has a smartphone or tablet—and therefore become potential customers for games and apps.  It’s going to happen soon, and then sales will explode.

You see where I’m going with this?

A Slow Start

EBook sales in the US burbled along for years, even decades, barely a blip on anyone’s tracking sheets.  High-tech prophets talked about the coming revolution, how electronic text would take the place of words printed on paper. Eventually, we stopped listening because people simply didn’t want to read books on their computer screen.

In 2002, Tor Books released the electronic version of my novel with Brian Herbert, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad.  Their electronic-rights person called me one afternoon, extremely excited to tell me that  The Butlerian Jihad was the #1 bestselling eBook title in the nation, and it had held that position for the entire month!  That sounded like great news—until I asked him how many we had sold.  His voice held an undertone of awe:  “Three hundred copies total!”

Well, that novel ended up selling over 140,000 copies in hardcover, and many more than that in paperback.  From that point, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to electronic books.

But when portable reading devices finally became inexpensive enough, usable enough, and (let’s admit it) cool enough—that’s when eBooks took off. And it happened with astonishing speed, taking many in the publishing industry by surprise, even though they had been thinking about electronic books for a long time.

Suddenly, everybody wanted a Kindle, a Kobo, a Nook, a Sony e-reader or similar device for Christmas or a birthday.  And as soon as the proud new owners had their own little toys, they loaded up their libraries, often with public-domain classics of literature (which they never actually read) or grabbing the complete works of their favorite writers.

Indie authors, fed up with traditional publishers or too impatient to wait for a deal to appear after years of submissions, decided to put up their own titles, charging 99¢ for the novel they had slaved over for years.

Authors like myself, with a substantial backlist of out-of-print titles that no traditional publisher wanted to reissue, released eBook versions . . . and stared amazed at the sales figures that rolled in.  And no wonder—for years, my established fan base had no way of reading my older books except to hunt them down in a used bookstore, and now they suddenly had access to dozens of novels they had heard of but could never find. All for five bucks or less.

Enter the next phase: Today, it’s no longer even necessary to own a dedicated Kobo, Nook, Sony e-Reader, or Kindle device. If you have a tablet or smartphone for other uses, all you need is an app.  You have an iPhone?  You have an eReader.  iPad?  EReader.

Read the whole thing here, and I’ll answer comments as I can over the day.

Things I’ve discovered in the last twenty four hours: it’s a really bad idea to fly with an ear infection, and it might turn you into a zombie.

As in, my ears are still doing weird poppy things, I was zonked by the time I walked off the plane, and  I spent most of yesterday, after landing, asleep. Right now I’m on my second cup of tea, and I’ve not yet decided if I’ll stay awake most of the day.  The goal, of course, is to rest enough that I can teach the workshop this weekend without killing myself. (Or eating my students’ brains.)

Mind you I am medicated and according to my doctor it’s not a virus, so I should not make anyone sick.  I just caution anyone attending to find shelter if I start muttering “brainz… brainz.”

Which brings us to a topic we’ve covered before but which can never be covered enough: How do you cope with physical weakness when your “job” is as much vocation as a way of paying the bills?  When the one thing you want to do when you start feeling better is the work?  And yet the work still takes it out of you?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that, as a society, we’ve become very cavalier about illness.

I meant think back on Jane Austen’s work.  In Pride and Prejudice, Jane catches a “trifling little cold” and is laid up for days.

Nowadays she’d take Sudafed and go on about her daily work.

Which brings me to – are we increasing contagion because we don’t take these things seriously, anymore?  I start getting sick the moment the kids go back to school.  That’s because people go to school while sick, because school doesn’t make allowances for sickness – yes, sure, you can skip classes, but for instance older son says there are no provisions for  grading skipped labs.  And younger son dragged himself in to take midterms on a serious sinus infection.

And of course, they bring stuff home, and I tend to catch it more severely than they do, partly, I THINK because I’m more isolated, most of the time.

We have medicines that mask the symptoms enough we can function, and, of course, we have antibiotics.

Only our antibiotics are becoming less effective.

What do we do?

There are thing I don’t know, like “Is it really bad for your to stay in bed that long?  Is it really better to be up and moving around as soon as you can?”  Or is this just what we tell ourselves because it fits our societal notions, and because our jobs/school/etc. no longer have any “give”.

I laugh everytime I read about the flu lasting “three weeks.”  Do you know anyone who can take that kind of time off?  And that’s a virus, and antibiotics won’t work.

What occurs to me – and it might be induced by stuffed ears and a feeling like I need to sleep rather a lot – is that we have the technology – we can make it better! – to not force people into the office while not quite the thing. (Except for my boss.  I work for myself, the boss is a stone cold b*tch.)

And what further occurs to me is that as antibiotics stop working it will take a while for societal modes to change.

So… how many people are we going to lose when either the first really bad virus (bird flu?) or the first bad bacterial infection rip through the population, while everyone is still obediently dragging themselves in to work?

Wouldn’t it be a better thing to start telecommuting and giving people some room now?

Do you want to be the first person to die for some student’s perfect attendance?

*As most of you know, I’m flying out to Bedford TX today to teach a workshop this weekend.  We’ll forget the fact I hate flying (No, we won’t.  Ya’ll keep my plane in the air till it’s SUPPOSED to land, you hear?  Or you don’t get any more books!) I woke up late, and am trying to remember all the last minute things, so thank you Alma Boykin for stepping into the breach with a very interesting piece. (Yes, I have other guest posts waiting and am likely to use them all over this weekend.  But Alma’s was the first one up.)*

Can a Dragon Play a Flute? Random Musings on Music in and Around Fiction

A guest post by Alma Boykin

Can you build a world without music in it? Would you want to? If space aliens have something analogous to our music, would we recognize it? What sort of music do you play in a space elevator?

As far as we know, humans have been making semi-musical sounds at least since the Mesolithic (i.e. the ice ages). We probably mimicked bird whistles and other environmental noises, and then started creating our own variations on whistles, cheeps, and thumps. Flutes and percussion instruments, or what seem to be flutes and percussion instruments, are found in graves all over Europe, Anatolia, and other places. Why do we do it? Because it’s fun? As a way to communicate with animal spirits? For religious reasons? To irritate the people in the next cave by banging loudly on a hollow log while they’re trying to sleep? Heck if I know. But over the course of time humans developed all sorts of ways to make noises, then put those sounds together into patterns that we call music. And then they put that music into their stories, or vice versa, since sung or chanted ballads predate novels by thousands of years.

Music appears in many, many sci-fi and fantasy stories. It ranges from religious music to bawdy ballads to formal instrumental compositions to something played for friends at a party. Music heals and kills. Can anyone who saw the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie from the House of Mouse hear the opening bars of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor” without seeing Nemo playing his pipe organ? Who here remembers bits of the Harpers’ ballads from McCaffrey’s Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies? You can put your hands down. Anyone willing to admit to listening to or even composing filk? Didn’t think so and I never have either, even though that’s what got me reading C. J. Cherryh. Slightly to the side, how many members of the general public had ever heard of Vangelis before the TV series Cosmos first aired?

Music can make the world for the reader. Sometimes literally, in the case of Aslan singing creation in The Magician’s Nephew. What people sing, play, like or consider unacceptable can give large amounts of flavor to a fictional world. Much of the Pern story falls flat without music, to the extent that you could argue that music IS the culture on Pern. The teaching ballads preserve the most important bits of history, the warnings about the Threads, and reinforce the social order. In fact, there’s an amazing amount of music in all of McCaffrey’s books, even the Ship Who series. She and Mercedes Lackey just might have the record for musical notes per page of text (although O.S.C. has a few moments, as does David Weber).

Music also helps make alien cultures more alien. Which can be a technical challenge for writers. Take, for example, a reptilian species with a complex society that has instrumental music suitable for religious and secular events. What sort of instruments will they use? Percussion is an easy and safe choice, since most limbs can beat on things or hold sticks or strikers of some form. What about wind instruments? Sure, except . . . your reptiles don’t have lips. Can they exhale through nostrils? How would you design a wind instrument for that (not counting P.D.Q. Bach’s nose-flute.)? Or would they use something powered by bellows, giving you versions of bagpipes and organs? How about plucked string instruments (harp, harpsichord)? Talons and catgut might not get along well, unless the musician chooses to wear a protective guard over her talons, or to clip them, which brings an interesting conundrum if those talons are needed for self defense. Are some musicians members of a special protected, but dependent, class? And what would their music sound like? If the aliens hear a broader frequency range than humans do, that could be an interesting plot point – a spy passing messages through music that human ears can’t register.

Often there’s a social aspect to music. Do the upper classes or castes listen to different music than the lower? Perhaps the political elite listen to simple instrumental selections, savoring the purity of the tone and melodic line, while the lower classes favor complex harmonies and catches, like bawdy bar songs with dropped rhymes (see “The Farmer” by the Wicked Tinkers for an example of the art). If religious music must be acapella, then is party music purely instrumental? Maybe that society’s really radical social rebels sing dirty songs acapella as an insult to the religious establishment.

For a while it seemed like every third short story included music as a way to communicate peace and harmony with aliens. Um, what if the first music they encounter is Queen, Iced Earth, and Black Sabbath, with a little Ramstein just to for variety? Earth might get turned into a smoking ember as a proactive step to keep such a violent species out of the stars! Or we could discover that the Little Green Men are headbangers who revere The Clash the way some of us look at Bach, Buxtehude, and Vaughn Williams. Or perhaps their favorite themes sound a lot like New Country (in which case, there is still no evidence for intelligent life in the galaxy, IMHO.)

Do aliens ever get earworms? No, not the Star Trek kind, but the “oh gads, make it stop, it’s stuck in my head, arrrgh” kind. I ended up writing a story around the MC getting an American folk hymn stuck in her head, and it keeps playing as she’s dealing with a medical mess. Does a character have a tune he always whistles or hums? Does it drive the rest of his work shift up the proverbial tree? And who managed to break into the interstellar fighter-carrier’s PA system and start singing an updated version of “Stand to Your Glasses Steady” without being caught?

And then there’s writing to music. Either here or over at the Mad Geneii’s place, the topic came up (or was it at the Passive Guy’s blog? Anyway.) about using music when you write. If memory serves, it came down to half the group eschewed music as a distraction, and the other half either used it for white noise or depended on it.

I will confess to preferring silence, except when I am fighting a mood or the TV. Gurney Halleck said, “Mood is for cattle and for love play,” not for fighting, but there are times when howling bagpipes or black metal are necessary to get me into the right frame of mind for a battle or combat scene. And sometimes a quiet, reflective movement calms me down when I’m bouncing too much to write a slow passage. It’s hard to beat the soundtrack to the remake of Battlestar for “creepy, something-around-the-dark-corner, did-you-hear-that” moments. For white noise, I have to have instrumental, or vocal music in a language I don’t speak, although some of the great masses are so familiar that they vanish into the background (Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” and “Requiem,” Hyden’s “Lord Nelson Mass,” the Faure and Rutter Requiems, Brahm’s German Requiem, Lauridson’s “O Nata Lux,” I think you can see a pattern here.) The trailer music compellations can be useful as well, again for bits of mood.

How musical is your reading and writing? And what does it mean if a culture has no music? Or if it had music and then rejects it as anathema, as a certain human sub-culture does today?

UPDATE: completely different post up at Mad Genius Club

So, first an update on the – physical – state of the writer.  It turned out that the sinus infection doubled back, and had hit the ears when I thought I’d got rid of it.  Ie. I got better for a little while, then it got way worse, fast.  Meaning I had the wrong anti-biotic for this particular bug.  Yesterday I felt like I was somewhat drunk (as to balance) and completely foggy in thinking.  Now if I’d been drinking nearly enough for the symptoms in the last day I’d have thought it was that. But because I hadn’t, and because I’d been this way before, I said “uh oh, doctor.”

I got the megadose antibiotic that cleared the last time things got this far, and I’m pleased to report my thinking is clearer.  I just don’t have “strength” to pull from.  I keep thinking I can do things, like I volunteered to make Robert an omelet, and afterwards I felt like I’d done a 12 hour shift as line cook.

Very annoying, since now both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge (they’re related, though I don’t think they share chapters.  Through Fire ends, then DSR2 begins.) are literally trying to dictate themselves.  This means I’ll try to write a bit before the workshop (supposing after the trip I’m not laid flat) tomorrow and Thursday (for those not initiated, I’m teaching a workshop in Bedford library (TX) Friday through Sunday (then flying back Monday.  Yes, I’m still terrified of flying, so ya’ll keep my plane in the air, okay?)  If you are not yet enrolled and decide you need it, ping Amanda S. Green on Facebook or email me.  Next year we’re going to try to do it at a different time, perhaps just after Liberty con.) and if I’m sort of spacey over the workshop you’ll know why.

It’s very frustrating to have the whole d*mn things (and btw The Brave & The Free thought it was a good time to start unspooling, too) in my head, knowing they just need to be typed, and have NO strength.

I guess I didn’t have strength before the meds either, but I also couldn’t think clearly enough to want to do anything, so that was okay.

The funny (but not ah ah) part of fever dreams is… they’re fever dreams.  Not to get into whoo whoo stuff, but when my health is weird, my dreams become unmoored in time.  It was in this situation I dreamed of Draw One In The Dark.

For those who don’t know the DOITD story: This was at a time when I couldn’t sell my books even if I printed them in gold.  I’d just crashed and burned with Shakespeare. My agent had dumped me, and no one would touch my stuff – and my agent wouldn’t let me send it under another name without informing the publisher.  This is when I got sick and while sick I dreamed someone brought it up to sign, and it was a bestselling series, though I’d broken into bestseller with another series.

What I dreamed specifically is that I was at the Mission Palms (my favorite con hotel) in Tempe AZ (though that might just be it had been the last I’d been at) and we were having an outside signing at night (when it’s warm, not sweltering) and someone came up with a box of my books to sign and started unpacking them.  They had the Shakespeare, and then they had this other series, including the hard cover of DOITD with the horrible cover and I said, “Oh, man, you are a collector.  You even have the terrible cover.” And she said “Well, I discovered you with – I don’t remember what she said.  MIGHT have been Darkships for all I know.  It sort of slid over me – but then I found everything you ever wrote and the shifters are my favorite.”  And I thought “shifters?” and since I hadn’t written any shifters, the me dreaming was smart enough to read the description.

Then the book sold, and it had a terrible cover, and I thought my career was over and then… well, I don’t know if it was a prophetic dream, but it MIGHT happen.  And if it does and you’re the person who brought me the books to sign, smile, you’re on candid (dream) camera.

Well, last night I dreamed I was receiving an award for my “bestselling” YA SF series.  What made this dream notable is that a bunch of Baen fans had thought it necessary to show up at an award that was CLEARLY normally intended for teachers and librarians and such.  They stuck in a group and stuck out, and made colorful commentary, and I was highly amused.

Well, I don’t know if the books were Baen, but since the only YA sf/fan series I have planned (yes, it’s betwixt and between) is Tiltamouse, and I didn’t think that would win any awards, I thought I’d look at the book.

I did as soon as I got off the podium from getting the award.

Let’s just say that the idea is so stunningly simple and yet so odd that… well… it’s something I always wanted to write it, only I didn’t know I did.

And I tested it.  I told it to son over breakfast.  The reaction was “if you don’t write that in the first two weeks you have free I’ll never talk to you again.  I WANT to READ it.”

I won’t go into how weird this is for older son, much less younger son, so I’ll just say I’ve got more stuff added to my slate.  (The question is will he be willing to do cleaning and cooking so I have two weeks free?  Greater love has no son…)

So, apparently there’s YA SF (With aliens, yet!) in my future, as long as the other stuff dictates itself.  This might postpone Bowl of Red till January.

Do I think it will win awards or be bestselling?  I don’t know.  Don’t care.  I think it will be – son’s word – “kickass” and therefore I want to write it.  And if Baen doesn’t want it (I don’t know how they feel about YA right now.  This is maybe late middle school early highschool – kids all between 14 and 17) then I bring it out.  It’s that powerful.

BUT today none of that is going to happen.

Today I’m going to do overdue page proofs, and edit a story and if there’s strength (maybe after a nap) do an overdue short story.

I am however going to take it easy, because I don’t want to get sick again.  This year has been ridiculous.  I’d resent it less if it were really illnesses – you know, the black plague or even brucitis of the cleaning woman knee.  Instead, it’s these half baked things: sinus, ears, colds, stomach flu.  I mean, how impressive does that sound?

Part of it is stress – no, we still don’t know how we make it for the next six months.  I’m fairly sure we can make it after that, but those six months are a blank.  There are things we can do, but we’re going to be sailing mighty close anyway.  (Never mind.  Right now the most important thing is to write very fast and get both Baen and indie stuff up.) And even after the six months I don’t see the surplus to finance a move.  However – we’ll have to find it because most of our money is locked in this house.  Trying to figure out ways and not seeing them, stresses me.

But that’s not the worst.  There’s the HVAC situation (today I need to call and get an appointment – hopefully – set to do the work next week, after I come back) and other stuff that is too tedious or not mine to report, that is making me tired and unable to sleep well enough, which in turn affects everything, including my ability to exercise.  (I’m still walking 3 miles a day.  Okay, not this week, because ears, but normally.  BUT when I was doing well, I was also doing ½ hour either running or elliptical every morning before breakfast, and I’ve just NOT had the strength for that.  However, it needs to restart, because my ankles are starting to get weakened from not enough exercise, and I’m gaining weight again.)

So, if I can muster it, I’m also going to put the first two of the musketeer’s mysteries up on ebook today, then fiddle with the paper re-edition after I get back.

BUT right now, I’m going to shower and maybe take a nap before I do any of that.  Which makes me feel like a total wimp, but it’s about where I am right now.

So that’s the state of the writer, the state of her dreams, and the state of her lack of time.

This blog post is written in haste.  I woke this morning with a raging ear infection which makes me about moron-level for reasoning, so bear with me.  As I put the last punctuation mark on this, I am going to grab my purse and run to the doctor.  (Well, amble.  I’m not really up to running.)

Yesterday pohjalainen  made a comment about lost civilization stories and how much she likes them.  I like them too.

Of course I don’t exactly believe in them.  It’s not that they’re impossible.  The 10,000 year old city temple they found with magnificent carvings of animals (some of which are either imaginary or long-extinct) and which had no middens (something that makes us think of, say, our modern malls) is not fully explained and could not have been anticipated.  And it seems like every other day a discovery pushes the date at which humans did x further back.

I was reading Dave Freer’s blog this morning and it occurred to me that the thing about highs and lows, and an irregular line of evolution applies not just to history but also to human evolution and to pre-history as well.

We start with the fact that further back than a certain time our information is, of necessity, fragmented and scant.  No, we haven’t discovered everything there is to discover about the people alive in those days.  As with the “missing links” in evolution, likely we are missing most of the stuff that is still there to discover.

Then take in account changing coast lines and where our most advanced population centers tend to be.  Then imagine that oh, ten thousand years from now, after a massive civilizational collapse, our descendants find remnants of a “great civilization” – some long lost village in Arabia stuck circa 700 AD.

This revolutionizes their idea of how advanced we were UPWARD.  Then they discover something, say, a turnpike in Podunk Kansas.  Who in hell is going to believe it.  There will be all sorts of papers explaining how it’s natural.

Because humans like our history tidy.  And I suspect it isn’t.  Depending on what you consider advanced civilization, there might have been several in the past.  And yes, they might have been wiped out without a trace (It occurs to me an ice age would do that very handily.)  And meanwhile there are things we’ll discover that are much older/more primitive, because, well, look at the world today.

When genetic markers first came up, people were saying crazy stuff like we only split from the chimps 100k years ago and therefore they know exactly how deep human history is.  Even at the time reading it, it occurred to me those speculations had a lot of baked in assumptions and precious little solid to stand on.  In fact, every time I pick up a book on the evolution of man I feel like I’m back in my literature courses, where people call each other names over minor disagreements, then go on to make up stuff out of whole cloth.

Again, I suspect evolution is not as simple as we see it.  Not that humans aren’t much different from our ancestors, we are.  But … well, guys, we are a randy species.  And in this case species is blurred as a line.  Turns out that you can, every once in a while, not often, for instance, get a fertile horse/zebra hybrid.  In the same way the more we know of our genome, the more we find other “species” in our line.  Which frankly makes reading our genome like reading a book written by a hundred writers and figuring out whose style it is.

So, have we “advanced” towards our modern form?  Or did we sometimes recede towards more primitive forms.  “Yes.” “Maybe” and “Who are you studying for modern?”

So it is possible that there have been higher civilizations than ours, and it’s very possible that there have been civilizations around the level of say the 18^th century several times before.  Perhaps wiped out by the ice age or other natural disasters.

Or perhaps the little things out of place were created by time travelers.

This is the stuff of magic, the stuff stories are built upon.

Unfortunately you can’t read or write good non-fiction speculation about it, because ten pages in, it all falls into mystic New Age or UFO nonsense.  You get the “And then the Earth changes when the goddess returns” and the book goes flying across the room.  And we won’t go into the greys orbiting the Earth, waiting to take us back.  No, we just won’t.

So I don’t believe in it, not because it’s utterly impossible, but because of the company it keepers.  (Which is not only everything for which there is no proof, but everything which has been disproven but is too much fun to let go.)

So, given all that, what is it about lost civilizations that holds such great appeal?

To me personally it is the idea that no matter how badly we screw up, someone of our genes – or our genus, at least – will be here thousands of years from now, and will be “civilized” if very different from us.  It’s the idea that, once kicked from the garden, we don’t wander in mud and darkness forever.

It also puts a fantastic spin on most myths and fairytales.  The Egyptian pyramids?  Totally the result of a muddled memory of cold sleep!  There were giants?  Well, with our food now…

You see what I mean.  It allows me to dream the past as well as the future.

And I like the idea of cyclical and near eternal things, which is why I love the seaside and the tides.

So how do you feel about the idea of lost civilizations (as story fodder, not necessarily as having existed)?  If you find them appealing, what appeals to you about them?