Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Once more, I got ahead of myself.  All day yesterday I thought it was Friday.  Which is why I published Witchfinder’s new chapters… Yesterday.  Feel free to smack me when I do this.  For now, if you’re looking for Witchfinder, page down.  I suspect I’ll be a little late posting in the morning, as I was up till past midnight (when I’m writing this) going over page proofs.  That doesn’t bother me.  The time displacement does.  I guess I should have the younger kid calibrate the time machine… again.

As many of you know I went to the Oregon Coast to take a workshop with Dean Wesley Smith and Scott William Carter with Special Guest Appearance by Kris Rusch ;), on the whats and hows of epublishing, and – more importantly – whys.

I’ve taken other workshops with Kris and Dean in the past, and this one was both similar to those (starting with the very first master class which I attended) and completely different.

It was similar in that Kris and Dean give value for their workshops.  I’ve said this before.  They don’t have the lengthy breakfasts, the laid back chats…  No, every minute of the workshop – and often of the working lunches, when they have to let us eat before we faint (grin) – is dedicated to learning.  This makes it very exhausting even if you already know some of the material they’re teaching and, probably, near-lethal if you’re learning and thinking it all for the first time.

This is in no way a complaint.  If you’re going across the country for a workshop; if you’re a writer who is perpetually semi-broke; if you have a family you’re leaving on their own while going, you WANT the workshop to be intensive.  The last thing you need is to spend time out there doing nothing, while you know you could be working at home.

It was very different from past workshops, though, in that Dean was sharing things he learned just recently and often saying “this might change” or “this might be different for you.”

It was similar because, as with many of their workshops, a lot of what they said I have to struggle to accept – even when I logically should know it’s true.

It was different because the market portion of it was more tentative.  See, the market portion used to be on how to submit to editors.  It now is on how to submit to… readers.  Editors were a small group, living in NYC, attending the same parties, talking about the same topics, practically inhabiting each other’s pockets.  You could psyche their preoccupations and their hot buttons one way or another.  Apparently my subconscious has a long – LONG – list of “do not write this, no one will buy it” topics, and by “no one” I mean NYC editors.  OTOH, ebooks are marketed to a for all intents and purposes infinite market, which does not live in each other’s pockets.  Who knows what will find a niche audience of, say, a million people or so, and take off like a rocket?

It was similar because the emphasis was on writing, telling good stories, writing fast and well.  Okay, it wasn’t a writing workshop, but 99% of the attendees were traditionally published authors, and Dean kept emphasizing if you stop writing to do tech, you will fail.  The writing is what drives all the rest, and the tech is designed to give you freedom to create what you want to, beyond the limits of the traditional market.

The funny thing is that they didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know.  I mean, at the back of my mind, I’d already arrived to similar conclusions.  I know this, because as they presented their conclusions, the reaction wasn’t (usually.  There’s one exception) Oh, Heavens.  I Never Thought Of That!  It was more like Oh, Well, DUH.  However, they were things I knew but would never have put together, if that makes sense.  As is, some of them, though I know intellectually, will take me months to adjust my mind to.

So, without further ado, let me give you some things I learned at the Think Like A Publisher workshop.

1- The market is infinite for all practical purposes.
Qualifications – of course it isn’t infinite.  There is a limited number of readers in the world.  Also, for now ebooks only reach into about four countries (easily and from the US, that is) and are way behind the US in most of those countries.  BUT in terms of “there will be enough people in that group that like any given thing that you could not just make a living but become a millionaire” the market is infinite.

1.a – This is an answer to the “tsunami of sh*t” complaint about how indies will ruin publishing.  You see, with that vast a market, what you have to remember is that there are a lot of people in the group you can now access who LIKE sh*t.  (This reminds me of the quip in Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment “I just said it was horse p*ss.  I didn’t say I didn’t like it.)

1.b. – by the law of statistics this creates a curious “flattening” of the market.  Yeah, some things will sell better than others, but not that insanely better.  Look, the thing about our “names” in publishing (by which I mean bestsellers.  For the benefit of the audience, no, I’m not a name.  I’m barely a name in my OWN household.) is that lately there have been so many of them they’ve become “niche names.”  Unless you’re talking of J. K. Rowling – and even then you might have to add “Harry Potter, you know?” – chances are any of your non-writing friends will give you a blank stare at the mention of any bestseller.  Heck, I’ve had people in the business give me a blank stare at t he mention of a bestseller in UF.  Part of what causes this is that there are so many books/authors out.  Now multiply that by a bazillion (yes, this is an exact figure!  Shut up.)  And throw in every writer who ever lived and whose work can be scanned in.  Compared to Rowling, I have a name in my own household.  Compared to, oh, Kipling, I’m “who is she?” even to my own kids.  But the thing is this is NOT a problem.  Why not? Because some night people might not want to read Potter or poems, and they might type in keywords that kick up my books – like Shifter.  Or Dark Ships.  And given an almost infinite market, there will always be a baseline of those enough to keep me in roof and meals and possibly even assistant.  Also, with luck and a little care on my part, they’ll come back because I give value.  And I’ll have an expanding audience that does not rely on gimmicks or publisher push.

2 – The supply is infinite for all practical purposes.  There’s every author who ever lived out there.  If you read a new author every day of your life, you’d never run out.  It’s reader’s paradise.  It’s also writer’s paradise.

2.a This creates the next answer to the tsunami of fecal matter thing – in the enormous pool of the market, no matter how much er… waste splashes in, it will be negligible.  Think of the difference between peeing in your bathtub and peeing in the ocean.  (This is not, btw, an encouragement to put out randomly generated stories, based on an algorithm that scrambles sentences and creates the equivalent of Atlanta Nights.  Peeing in the ocean is still bad manners and if people pay you for it, they’ll get upset.  At you, personally.)

2.b.  The doors have been thrown wide open.  You want to write about people who have a fetish for hydrogen peroxide?  There are probably enough of them out there to make you a very rich writer.

3- Chinese Math applies.  Sort of.
(Chinese Math states that if you sell something for a dollar to every Chinese person, you’ll still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.)

3. a But Sarah, you say, you are unlikely to produce something that EVERYONE out there wants to read. [Stop.  Just stop.  You’re giving me the shakes.  I’m visualizing billions of dollars flowing in.  (Moans.  Clears throat.  Sits up straighter.)]  Right.  So, I am.  But I don’t need to.  Even if any given piece of my work appeals to say 1000 people on any given month, I’m making a living.  And if it appeals to 10000 people, I’ll be making a GOOD living.

3.b. It has a multiplier effect.  If one piece of my writing appeals to a thousand people a month (these numbers seem to be unrealistic, btw, unless you’re very good or very lucky.  Or both – hi Ric!  If a story is doing well it will sell maybe a few hundred a month) then why don’t I have ten pieces out?  Or twenty?  What am I, stupid?  At the level of criminal stupidity?  Agatha Christie used to say she sat down and said “I think I’ll write myself a house.”  Midlisters, in a way can now do that.

3.c. It REALLY has a multiplier effect, because readers are creatures of habit.  What in heck do I mean by that?  Well, once we find a writer we like we will keep reading him/her.  Sudden, for us, that author has stood up and is beyond the random selection thing I talked about.  Oh, it’s unlikely he/she will be an author “everyone is talking about” – look at that near infinite supply thing – BUT he/she will have a growing share of the market and enough to be very rich indeed.  So, have books out there under the same name/in the same style, etc, enough to make a living.

4. Book launches are irrelevant.  So is most other publicity.

4.a. All they do is speed up the process of finding an audience.  Okay, so perhaps not totally irrelevant, particularly very early on, when you want to start seeing some money for a proof of concept on your indie efforts.  But ultimately, say two years in the future, you’d be in the same place.  This means, if you can wait, you don’t need to publicize. Your book is not going to age or fall off the shelf.

4. b. Yes, this means that books don’t “age” – that relates to shelf space, etc.  If anything, since the best publicity in the new market is word of mouth, older books have an advantage.  Stop thinking of your books as bananas that will spot and spoil.  Now.

4.c. If you’re the sort of writer who wants to sit down and write furiously, your time has arrived.  (Thank G-d almighty, free at last.)  Oh, okay, you might need to learn some basic coding, but I’m now where I can see how to do it, sort of.  And if I can do it, ANYONE can do it.  Including people who’ve never seen a computer before and for whom chipped flint is the height of technological innovation.  (Yes, that’s how techy I am.)

4.d. There is no such thing as a “big book.”  Oh, sure, some of your work will sell better than other work.  But the difference won’t be enough for you to think in “big book” terms.  What I mean is for most of us, the editors have got in the back of our head and made us think things like “Oh, this next book is going to be huge.”  Now you don’t need to let that happen.  Just make each book the best it can be, and enjoy the process.

Now, for the one thing that is still hard for me to accept: It is still very early days on this.  Dean said it over and over again.  And I couldn’t believe it.  I mean, intellectually I know it’s true.  The very cumbersomeness of the software proves it.  You have to spit and duct tape things.  When it becomes more main stream, it will become easier, and eventually there will be a push-button solution.

But that’s INTELLECTUALLY.  Emotionally, it seems like everyone got there before me.  I have to tell myself this is not true and to calm down.

Anyway – these are the general impressions from the workshop.  Of course I can’t tell you everything they said over three days.  Even if I could, I’d miss little points, which would mean something for you that they don’t mean for me.  This is all filtered through my mind, of course, and I might have drawn conclusions the presenters never intended.  However to me, it is what I’ve seen.

I went to the revolution and took some snap shots.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to write me a house.

Okay, guys, I’m just back and my brain is still on the plane, somewhere between Oregon and Colorado.  I tried but couldn’t write anything coherent.  (When do you write anything coherent, anyway? — ed. note  Shut up, you — writer’s note.)

I have SO much to do today it’s not even funny.  Would you believe that my kids didn’t clean while I was gone.  (Stop laughing, you — writer’s note.)  They have this peculiar male thing, where kitchen counters don’t exist, too.  They did dishes, mind, but the counters were never so much as wiped down.  Every male of my acquaintance has this problem, and I’m puzzled by it.  What is with you guys and counters?  Are you part of a counter resistance movement?

I also need to sit down and draw a schedule of my duties for various publishers and for myself, make appointments to figure out the legal structure of the imprint I’m starting, and … Oh, G-d.  (Moans)  Good thing I don’t need to sleep.  Of course I might go completely insane.  (Like anyone would notice — ed note.)

So, I’m going to get off the computer, take a shower, get off my robe (Yes, yes, this is being typed by a woman in a state of semi-dress.  DEAL.)  and into cleaning clothes.  And then I’m going to de-cat-hair the house, so I can stop sneezing and scour the counters, which are hopefully still there, and under the grease and the coffee stains.  Oh, yeah, doing the catboxes, too, which I bet no one has done.

Then I’m going to make massive pot of coffee and sit down to draw up a schedule.  I’m very afraid this will involve a white board.  Sigh.

Frankly, the biggest problem over the next year or so is the “retooling of the brain” and “learning to get out of my own way.”

Wish me luck.

I’m not going to post this here.  In fact I don’t propose to post more than the first chapter here.  It’s almost finished, it’s being posted in snippets on the bar and on the face book diner (the CLOSED group.  If you want in, ask nicely.)  It will go to Baen first.  If Baen doesn’t want it, NRP has called dibs.  But I very much hope Baen wants it, since it’ s technically the “other half” of the Darkship books.  (Those will continue but they deal with things OUTSIDE Earth.  These are the Earth part.)

The Monster

Carry Me To the Water

The world celebrates great prison breaks.  The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.
They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.
Monsters like me.
My name is Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, Luce to my friends, though I killed the last one of those fourteen years ago.
I was born the son of Good Man Keeva, one of fifty men who control the immense territory and wealth of Earth between them, and have for the last three hundred years.  As good as a prince.
But for the last fourteen years, my domain had been a cell, six by ten, with a cot attached to the wall, a fresher in the opposite corner that served to have a sort of vibro-wash and clean one’s clothes, and to take care of the other necessities of the body, all in one.  At the foot of my bed there was a dispenser through which a self-opening can of food and a container of drink came through every so often.  I thought it happened three times a day, but I couldn’t swear to it.
I couldn’t see light from my cell.  But cans arrived three times for each period they kept my lights turned on, so I considered that a day.  And I kept count by saving one of the cans and scratching it on the side with the lid.  Three hundred and sixty five days made a year with the usual adjustment.  And I had fourteen of those to the day when freedom came, unexpected and terrible.
It wasn’t strictly true that I hadn’t seen another human being in fourteen years.  Once, in the middle of the second year, I’d got very ill.  Who knows how, unless the food was tainted – perhaps it was.  I’d caught an infection that wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t be healed by any of the usual means.  They transferred me to a secure hospital ward for two weeks.  A very secure ward, with robots as caretakers and the doctors who saw me only remotely, at least after I regained conscience.  I retained a vague memory of having been touched while only semi-conscious.  Touched by human hands.
But after I became conscious only mechanicals touched me.  Still through the window, made of transparent dimatough – I know, I tried to break it – I could see people coming and going.  Men and women walking around, free, under the sun or the rain.  I remembered them very clearly, each of their expressions, their clothes, their movements.  I’d spent years remembering and making sure I didn’t forget that there were real, live people out there.  Even if I was as good as buried alive.
Twice more I’d been hospitalized, when I’d tried to commit suicide.  And once I’d been attended by humans, while they sewed the open cut on my face, from having got the cot to drop on my head.  I remembered that touch too.  Because down here, in the artificial light or the dark, it was easy to imagine there was nothing else.  Nothing but me, all alone in the world forever.
A world and a monster.  Forever.
Fourteen years after my arrival in Never-Never, I was exercising.  I’d found that just lying around and sleeping made it difficult to sleep and all too easy to stay up all through the time my lights were off, thinking of ghosts.  I’d tried that for three years.  Now I exercised.
I partitioned my day, so that in the morning – or right after the lights went on and I ate the first can of food – I cleaned myself, removed my beard with the cream provided, vibroed my one, faded yellow body suit and put it on, because it gave me the illusion I was still part of the world of living humans, and that someone, somehow, might see me.
Then I sat down and used the gem reader some kind soul had slipped into my cell through the food dispenser almost at the beginning of my captivity.  I used it through gems totaling about five hours, and then the second food ration was dispensed.  And then I exercised.
Back when I was the pampered heir of Olympus Seacity, I’d been provided with exercise machines, and hired trainers.  Turned out you could do just as good a job, or perhaps better, using your body as a counter weight and resistence.  If you had five hours and nothing else to do.
Oh, I used my bed in exercises too.  Since I’d almost managed to kill myself by getting the bed to fall on my upturned face, they’d fixed it so it was permanently attached to the wall, permanently down, and couldn’t fall.  Not even when a man who must be six seven and close to three hundred pounds – I had no way of weighing or measuring myself – suspended himself from it, over and over and over again.
I had my palms spread flat on the bed – at about the level of my pelvis – and was using my arm strength to push down on it and pull myself up, till my feet left the floor completely for a count of twenty, then down, then up again.  I was on my hundredth rep of the day, counting aloud: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen–
Boom.
Boom is not the way to write it down.  It was like a boom a crash and a woosh, all in one, deafeningly loud.
I let go and found myself cowering under my bunk, my back flat against the cold, smooth wall, my head bent, my arms around my knees.  Instinctive.  It is instinct to try to make yourself small and unobtrusive.  Not that I was ever either.
My mind ran through what could have caused the boom.
The first thought was that it was impossible.  Had to be.  There was no way – no possible way – that there could be that type of explosion anywhere near me.
The prison that had been my home so long was called Never-Never because it was the safest, best guarded and most absolutely secure prison in the history of mankind.  It was impossible there had been an explosion there.  And if there were, it would do nothing but drown all the prisoners, because as I remembered from when I’d been transported here in the dark of night, Never-Never was under water, sealed into the base of a seacity.  Most people didn’t even know it existed.
Yet there were other noises from outside.  Noises I wasn’t used to hearing.  Normal prison noises – cherished as random diversions from an otherwise monotonously ordered day – were distant conversations, too distant to hear the words, and sometimes the sound of muffled footsteps walking by outside my door.  Sometimes, rarely, there was a scream, perhaps as a new victim was dragged down to this antiseptic isolation.  Unlike prisoners of an older era, we didn’t even have rats as consolation.
Now the screams came one after the other.  There were drumbeats of running feet.  An odd sound scared me, for a moment, until I realized it was laughter.  And then there was… singing?
My mind raced, making my heart race, and not all the will power in the world could bring me out from under my cot.  Until I saw the water.
At first it showed as a filmy sheen, under my door.  I blinked at it.  Sweat stung my eyes, and I was sure that it was a mirage.  Although Never-Never was under the ocean, I hadn’t seen water except in my drink dispenser for fourteen years.  The fresher was strictly vibration only.  At a guess long before I’d been brought here, some clever soul had stopped up the waste disposal hole with cans, by keeping five or ten of them stopped up the space under the door, perhaps with the blanket – then filled the cell with fresher water.
Now the only way to commit suicide by drowning would have been to block the hole, stop up the crevice under the door, then piss enough.  Even if drink hadn’t been controlled, I didn’t think even I could muster enough desperation for that.
So when the water first came in, it took me moments to believe it – dozens of minutes of my staring in disbelief, while it crept under the door, in increasing quantities, till it lapped at my bare feet, cold and wet.  I put out a finger, dipped it in the water and tasted it.  Sea water.  There was a hole in the prison.  A hole that let in seawater.  I reacted.
Or rather, my body reacted, which means it did something stupid, as bodies will when you’re not paying attention to them.  I jumped up, cracking my head – hard – on the cot, then bent again and scrambled out from under the cot, on my hands and knees, splashing in what had to be, now, two inches of water.
My heart beat hard, and my throat was trying to close in panic.  Never-Never was completely under water, even if the entrance was up above the water line, a narrow, well-guarded hole on a Seacity floor.  The explosion could not have been at the main entrance, or no water would be coming in.  That meant it had to be in the underwater wall, somewhere.
Never-Never had seven levels.  Seven circles of hell.  I was on the sixth down.  If I understood the organization properly, and it was entirely possible I didn’t, this level housed the most dangerous prisoners.  The level below me contained only torture cells.
I’d been taken to them when I’d first come to Never-Never.  I’d never understood what exactly they wanted to know or what they thought torture would accomplish.  Maybe they just liked hearing me scream.
I tried to remember exactly how long it had been from boom to water under my door.  The water was now up to my ankles, and I couldn’t think clearly.  It felt like the explosion had simultaneously taken place several years ago and only a heartbeat away.  But the water was now above my calves, which meant the hole had to be nearby.
They’d come, I told myself, swallowing, imagining the cell filling with water to the ceiling, drowning me.  They’d come before I was floating lifeless.  They’d never let me commit suicide, and they weren’t about to let me die now.
Yes, I’d tried to commit suicide before, but you need to work yourself up to a certain pitch of despair for that.  I wasn’t there now.  I had a brand new data gem, slipped in yesterday’s otherwise empty mid day food can.  It claimed to be ancient novels, from the twentieth century.  Thirty of them.  I hadn’t even looked at the gem at all.  I’d been saving it, reading my old gems: history and science, music and language, and saving the new one like a rare treat.  New ones came in seldom and irregularly.  I’d gladly forego a meal a day for a gem, but I never got that.  This was the first new gem in three months.  And now I’d die without reading one word of it.
I lurched towards my cot again.  I kept the gem reader – a cheap, tiny unit of the sort you used to be able to buy for a couple of cents anywhere – and the gems in the crevice between bed and wall.  Not exactly hidden.  Either the cell was wired for sound and sight – and it probably was – and they didn’t care I had it, or else it wasn’t and they didn’t know.  No one ever came in to inspect, so no one would find it otherwise.  But I kept it there so it wouldn’t fall and break.  The gems were my only connection to other humans: to their words, their minds, their thoughts.  If I lost them, I would quickly lose whatever grip I retained on reality.
Perhaps I had, I thought, as I grabbed the gems and the reader, and wrapped the whole thing, tightly, in my coverlet.  Perhaps this was all an hallucination.  The coverlet ripped easily but I’d found in the past, when I’d spilled drink on it, was completely impermeable.  Like water proof paper.  I was thinking that neither gems nor reader were designed to be exposed to salt water.  And if I broke them, new ones might not be provided.
Though they had to come from someone within the system, they couldn’t be exactly official, or else they’d not be sent inside otherwise empty food cans.
I wrapped the whole as tightly as I could, ripping the coverlet and tying it over itself.  The torn strips weren’t sturdy enough to hang oneself with, but they worked for this.  I slipped the packet inside my suit.  The water was now up to my knees.
Splashing, I drew myself up to my cot and stood on it, my hands on the ceiling for balance.  That would keep me safer longer and give someone time to rescue me.
They would come.  They had to come.  After all my clever attempts at killing myself, they weren’t going to let me die like this.
A voice screamed something outside the door.  No, wait, sang.  Then there was…
A flash of sound and light that glared through the hole in my door where the lock used to be.  I blinked.
When I opened my eyes again, the door was open, and above the ripple caused by the door opening, standing on a broom was the most unlikely angel of deliverance I’d ever seen.

This is a short post (okay, short for me, anyway) as I’m getting ready for the last session of the workshop.  I don’t know if I can post at all tomorrow, since I’ll be traveling, but because I like you guys (Grin) I’ll cue up the first chapter of the current almost-finished novel in the Thena-verse (but not with Athena.)  I’m posting this a chapter at a time in the diners (Face book and Baen Bar) and will probably take it halfway through the novel or a little beyond.  I don’t propose to do that here, just post one chapter tomorrow.

Anyway, I think they’ve done it to me again.  They being Kris Rusch and Dean W. Smith.  Done what you say?  Well, twelve years ago, I was living a blameless (largely unpublished, too) life, writing about a novel every two years and a short story where lightning struck.  I thought that was the most I could produce.  I mean, I had two small children, a house, cats…

I came back from their workshop writing a short story a week and a minimum of two novels a year.

I’m very much afraid they’ve broken me again.  I think if I’m not worried about the soul killing prospect of having to write the first three chapters, then kill the characters if they don’t sell, because I can always put it out myself, I can write a lot more than that.  Now, you guys might not see all of it (unless you’re really the kind of fan who’d buy my grocery lists — yes, they do have funny comments) since a few will be very, very, very, very closed pen names.  But…  time will tell, right?

Meanwhile I’m making lists of every almost-finished novel nixed by the gatekeepers.

POPcorn Kittehs!

And this time it’s serious

So, Sarah how is the workshop going?  Well…  Wonderful and terrible and everywhere in between.

The terrible part comes from my normal relationship with software.  Try it, screw it up, try it again, scream, cry, throw fits.  Repeat.  Somewhere along the line master it and go “oh, this is easy.”  I did put a “book” (actually a short story) up on both smashwords and Amazon and, OMG, it’s ugly.  I know that my friend Amanda Green WILL read me the riot act about the mess it is.  I know, I know, Amanda, but this is how I learn.  After I master it, I’ll go back and clean it up.  I am starting to understand why you do so much work on these things, though.  We’ll talk about it.  And eh.  It’s probably better than most small presses are kicking up.  And if anyone at the workshop with me reads this: I’m really not Diva Bitch From Hell.  It’s just how I react to software when I’m learning it.  It’s like…  Ms. Hide comes out, because I’m so frustrated and don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  Normally I’m only HALF Diva Bitch From Hell.

The most enlightening bit was about covers.  I THOUGHT I’d mastered that.  OMG.  I had NO clue.  Never mind.  Eventually I’ll discuss that, but meanwhile let me say if you’re going to go indie, take Dean W. Smith’s Think Like A Publisher workshop.

The wonderful part is where Dean Wesley Smith has actually convinced me, particularly given my back list, that I can actually make a living from Indie publishing.  This doesn’t mean I’m going to completely abandon traditional publishing.  I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, just for the sake of making sure everyone gets this: I’m not abandoning Baen.  I could no more do that than I could disown my family.  I will work for Toni as long as she wishes me to.  There are debts that can’t be paid, and the one I owe Baen for picking me up when no one else would is one of those – without them I wouldn’t be a writer today.  This is a debt beyond money, beyond time and beyond qualification.  It will never be paid.  (Okay, so I come from an honor culture.  Live with it.)

Again there is at least one other house, Prime Books (not Prime Crime, which is an imprint of Berkley) which I’ve just started working with.  So far I have no complaints about them, and unless they make the process of working with them painful, I’ll probably continue working with them.  (They’re doing the vampire musketeers under Sarah Marques – warning for those who are my regular readers, this is strong, strong stuff quite different from the rest of my work.  It involves odd sex and… well, just odd.  If it’s not the sort of thing you mind, though, you might find it’s my best work.  The first book Sword And Blood is scheduled for – I think – next Spring.)  There is one other house I wouldn’t mind working for, though I haven’t got around to sending them the proposal yet.

The operative word here is “wouldn’t mind” – I am however becoming convinced that  I don’t need traditional publishing to survive (not if I can make this work and as I said, I’m beginning to believe I can.)   And that is a completely different ball of wax from what I’ve been doing and going through.  I will, eventually, explain all or at least most of the differences, but for now, I’ll say that the most important is mental – and I’ve only started undertaking it.

Okay, first of all, because publishers lived for the “big book”, the one that would “break out” they’ve got into my head and conditioned me to think that way too.  They got into my head pre-production, which I’d sort of understood, but not really.

I mean, I’d understood the “you don’t want to write this, it will never sell” bit.  All of us have gone through it.  But apparently I also have a stop that says “you can’t write this it’s not ‘big’ enough.”  Based on this, I’ve shelved a bunch of “sheer fun” space opera ideas.  I’ve also shelved a bunch of characters as “objectionable and borderline reprehensible.”  Oh, not to me.  Not to the readers (I think) but to the publishing gatekeepers.

Now, it’s not so much a matter of popcorn kittens.  I mean, you know those, right?  Kris linked them.  All the kittens (ideas) jumping and you can’t finish anything.  This is worse…  These are long buried ideas resurfacing, whole novels, novelletes, novellas and short stories.  Entire universes and galaxies are springing back from the turf of “thou shalt not” where I had buried them.

I have to finish the three books between hands, the three books I “owe” trad publishing.  Because after that I need to budget half my time for self and NRP.  Because…

They came from the subconscious.  They’re alive.  And this time, they want my typing fingers!

A hurried post today.  Sort of ties in with yesterday’s.  Sort of.

Random thoughts on change and on technological change specifically:

As we get older we lose our taste for rapid change, even those of us who were always at the edge of it (and my husband and I were both early compute and early internet adopters.)  I note a change in me as I contemplate these trips on business.  I don’t want to travel, partly because t takes time from my novels, but also because it breaks my routine.  And I like my routine.  I like my bed.  I like my neighborhood, I like my office-ish.  I know this makes me sound old and peevish, but there it is.

On the other hand, I’m not that old, and our society is aging faster than I am, since boomers are the largest component of it and they’re getting older.

Is it my impression, or is it a really bad circumstance to have a large component of elderly people in a society experiencing fast, catastrophic technological change?

In former times, people often lost their profession to change, but that was okay, as they lived much shorter lives than we do.

On the other hand, would you trade your longer life for a more stable world?  I wouldn’t.

Will a more aged population slow the change, as we cling stubornely to “the way things used to be”?  Would publishers be reacting this badly if the median age of management weren’t older than I?  What is the ideal balance between flexibility and life experience?  Is the fact that Europeans are, as a population, older than us a factor in how they’ll react to the economic crisis?

I don’t have any answers.  Each of those questions could lead to a speculative essay, but not while I still need to kick the cat out of my suitcase – again – and finish packing.  I might pursue these the rest of the week.  For now, I’d like to hear your thoughts and your further questions about how much of our sense of crisis is the fatal intersection of national aging and technological change.

As we all know I grew up in the sort of quaint place that fairytales – and fantasy books – wax poetic (and often pathetic) about.  So it will surprise absolutely no one if I tell you it came with the necessary accouterments of proverbs and picturesque sayings.  (Because, to allude to my son’s Ninja Nun comic, the touristry ministry gives you seven kinds of h*ll otherwise.)

One of those charming proverbs was something along the lines of (tries madly to remember) “Why would you want, fiddler, to learn to play the harmonica?”  and, with total disregard for one-men-bands, this was supposed to allude to the fact that if you do something well you should stick to it, and not go haring off in search of new work, and different experiences.  (There was also something about potters not mending pans.)

As charming as it is to think that this served people well in a long-forgotten time of stability when a son followed his father’s footsteps into a profession, world without end, I’ve read enough to suspect that this was not ever really true.  I mean, do some sons follow their father’s professions?  Sure.  Talent tends to run in families, so if your father is a brilliant mathematician, or a really good farmer, (or both) chances are so are you.  But here’s the thing, there’s a good chance that the son won’t follow the father’s profession exactly the SAME way.  Chances are that the son will follow it sideways, with a twist, more so, less so…  The sons who just – to extend the methaphor – follow their father’s furrow to the end, always strike me as a little sad, a little… manque, like something is missing of the essential spark of life that animates other people.

And there’s reason to think those sons (and daughters) are not the majority and never were.  Even in the middle ages there were laws in almost every European country saying that a son had to do what the father did, at least in those professions considered essential.  At least, once the plague opened opportunities of advancement in Europe and broke the chains of feudal serfs, everyone seemed to hare off to better their status.  Laws, of course, didn’t work to keep them back on the farm.  (Laws, most people tend to forget, don’t work without heavy enforcement, and then often don’t work as they’re meant to.  Take the minimum wage law (please.) Because it contravenes economic fact, it has resulted in a flood of illegal laborers.  But that’s musing for another day.)  But they did leave us a useful testimony to the fact that life was never as stable as we’d like to think it was.  The golden age back there only seems so to us because we know how the struggles that consumed people at the time will end.

However, I will concede, if anyone is interested – you, back there, stop pretending to sleep.  That’s such a fake snore! – that we’ve entered a time of marked and tumbling change in most professions.  Disruptive change.

Not all change is disruptive, see.  Oh, I know, twentieth century.  Oxcart to moon landing, yeah.  But look, in the essentials, the automobile was just a faster and safer and more affordable (because no horses to maintain) form of carriage.  And most people (more’s the pity) never got close to going to the moon.  Manufacturing got faster and cleaner and better.  A lot of things got cheaper.

I’m not going to pretend this didn’t change lives.  Of course it did, and I experienced a lot of that change myself, over a compressed time.

What I’m going to say is that it didn’t change the processes of life, or not as much as we expect, or at least not in most professions.  Yeah, if you were an old buggy whip maker, you might have retired early, and your apprentices might have gone to study mechanics.  Heck, to read, say the Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie in sequence, tells us how much the texture of life changed before and after the war.  But Mis Marple didn’t suddenly have to learn to knit using a computer, say.

Now, this is a gross generalization.  A lot of professions, particularly towards the end of the twentieth century, had to learn to knit using a computer, to work that metaphor further.  But by and large, the processes set at the end of the nineteenth century for “how life works” continued the same way.  Yeah, now a woman as well as a man might go out of the house to earn her living.  But even that is not that out of the pattern, since women in the lower classes worked in the factories since the industrial revolution.

And that’s why I think you need to go back to the industrial revolution, to its total upending of what had been a centuries-old way of life, to see the equivalent of what we’re going to: villages which had been stable for centuries were suddenly emptied by people leaving for town to work in the factories; young people who had always started working at ages that seem impossible to us now, suddenly were at least thought to be better off in school (and most of them ended up in school, after a while) because the industrial revolution required workers trained to work in groups and to obey and be punctual; work became something you did outside the house, instead of in the house, often with the participation with the family.  Etc. etc. etc.

The only thing that made the industrial revolution slightly less (a very little less) frightening than what we’re seeing now is that it was slower.  Or at least it seems so to us, from where we’re standing.  (And even then, the fast pace of change and the fear and angst it occasioned, particularly among those with power but more generally too, ended up giving us the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and, generally speaking, rivers of blood – I’m very afraid we won’t emerge on the side of this without experiencing the equivalent, but that’s a musing for another article.)

From where we’re standing, only biblical type phrasing seems appropriate, only the Bible – is for some reason – quite lacking in metaphors having to do with machinery and tech.  So, I’ll have to make do and tell it onto you verily (yea!): Brothers and sisters, the day is coming, roaring like a freight train, and when the day arrives, of our way of life there won’t be left stone standing upon stone.  (Yes, today I am devoted to stretch all metaphors till they scream, why?)

Call it singularity, if you want to.  I won’t because the word comes freighted (trains again) with ideas of immortality and brain jacks, and I really can’t be having with that just now.  But the essence of the singularity as something past which everything is different, so different that understanding before and after is very difficult, is there.  Yes, I think change will be that extraordinary.

Now, perhaps I’m silly, because I’m a writer and right now my profession is getting hit on the snout with the rolled newspaper of catastrophic change in tech.  (Mostly for the better, mind.  But the better doesn’t seem so, when we’re in mid-change.  Security is gone and we must adapt faster.)  But it seems to me that most of your professions are in for it, too, and not far behind mine.  Oh, I don’t think heavy manufacturing is close to changing that much yet – except a lot of it is already done by robots.  Doctoring is probably safe for a while longer.  But things like… teaching.  Uh, your time is coming, roaring like a freight train.  And don’t get me started on a bunch of other professions.  At the end of this, we’ll be able to write a scene like at the beginning of City (by Clifford Simak.)  You know “And sometimes the children asked, what is a teacher?  What is a movie studio?  What is a publishing house? What is a freight train?  Historians told them to be quiet.  These words were just made up and the stories just metaphors, to be enjoyed and not thought over.”

So, what can we do?  Besides try to make sure that this time – unlike the last catastrophic tech change – we don’t end up wading in blood up to our metaphorical ankles?  (It might be out of our hands, but its our duty as humans to try to prevent it.)

We can tell the proverb about fiddlers and harmonicas to take a flying leap.  You see, what makes this change so difficult, right now, is that we’re in the air, with all our paws (what, you don’t have paws when you leap? Odd that!) flailing, not absolutely sure where we’ll land, or how to brace for impact.

As with any leap, the way to make things easier is to look ahead and set ourselves where we can fall standing on all four paws and ready to run, attack or cower as needed.  And in this over-stressed metaphor world, seeing what’s ahead means learning as much as possible about the tech that’s causing the change.  And following the lives of those who are ahead of us in the leap.  (Thank heavens for blogs.)

In the interest of the first, I, the world’s least technologically inclined fiddler must now learn to play the harmonica of tech.  (NOT a real harmonica, for those of us who know of my inverse musical talent.)

I am headed for Oregon this weekend, to take Kris Rusch’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s Think Like A Publisher workshop, part of which involves the tech of making ebooks.  Yes, of course I am terrified.  Look, after weeks of my nooddling with the attempts to put up a donate button, my husband did it for me yesterday in about seven minutes (Look, there, on the sidebar to your right at According To Hoyt, though I don’t intend to mention except while posting the free novel.)  The problem is when faced with most tech stuff my brain stops being able to think linearly and, instead, spins in a tight circle upon itself.  But never mind that.  I’m sure it was very hard for Og, who had just used stones picked up from the ground to get his mind around the flint-chipping thing.  But if Og didn’t manage it, the young men with their sharp flints left him behind (hopefully alive, I make no promises for the morals of cavemen) and killed and ate all his normal hunting prey, so that Og was left to finish his miserable life eating only grass and berries.

Berries are okay, but I don’t like grass.  And I really like steak.  So I will muster this flint chipping before the lack of knowledge destroys me.

And, lest you think I’m done abusing metaphors: the fiddle player will one way or another become a one woman band and march over the horizon to mend some pans.

Crossposted at Mad Genius Club