Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a compilation of how the ebook front looks to me at the moment. Things might look completely different to the next person over, particularly if the next person over knows more about publishing than I do (which isn’t as easy as it used to be, but is also not impossible.) I thought it might interest those of you who are on the outside or not professionally involved in the field.

First let me tell you that a lot of the stuff you hear about ebooks and how everyone is reading ebooks is just pie in the sky. It is talk that is familiar to me – and has been for a while – because ebooks have been talked about in every possible venue (and some impossible ones) for the about twenty years I’ve been paying attention to the market.

Long before I sold my very first short story – heck, long before I sent it out – I was attending conferences in which some minor agent or editor solemnly informed us that the coming thing was ebooks and it would upend all of publishing. Or else that the coming thing was novels with active content.

It went on for so long, in fact, that everyone – this included, I think, most of the NY publishing establishment – gave up on it and decided ebooks were a lie. I started hearing theories on why they’d never come: book readers are inherently more conservative than game players; books on paper are a sensuous experience – etc.

Of course now things are different. Now we have Amanda Hocking and such, surprise bestsellers created by epublishing.

But are things different? Really? There have always been “self published bestsellers”, what we used to call “books from the back of the van.” Look up The Celestine Prophecy. Twelve years ago I attended the Pikes Peak Writers conference and – as an unpublished author – was told my best shot was to publish my own book, “with a nice cover” and then send it that way to the publishers, who were then more likely to buy it. “Particularly if you’ve hand-sold 500 copies or so yourself.” Was this true? I don’t know. Just as I don’t know if Dean Wesley Smith’s advice that I do a POD of a book, then send it to editors with a specific letter on what rights I’m willing to sell would work. It might. Or it might not. It SHOULD. But… are we there yet?

Gut feeling? No. We’re not there yet. I think we’ll be. I do think there’s a future for writing and for writers. Whether there will be a lost generation first, that’s something I can’t answer. I will give, though, as a shred of hope, the fact that this whole thing is moving much faster than I expected. OTOH keep in mind it’s moving much slower than industry insiders expected twenty years ago.

So, here’s a snapshot of the battle as I see it right now. Remember, in a large battle all a foot soldier can see is the area around herself. Over a few dozen feet it might be completely different.

Here’s what I see – through the email lists I belong to, through reading articles and gleaning numbers from whispered comments – most writers aren’t making a living from their own ebooks yet. In fact, all the way from high mid list to raw beginner, the numbers are startlingly consistent and run in the mid hundreds at best – or about 10% even the suckiest publisher printrun.

This is for fiction and specifically for genre fiction. It’s entirely possible that it’s completely different for non fiction and how to books. I wouldn’t know.

It’s possible the reason for this is that – by publisher choice of what to publish – genre readership has been graying. They are now at best late middle age, a time when people don’t adopt technology very fast. But the graying of the readership was a problem before ebooks, and one we’ll have to contend with anyway.

The fact that romance is the one genre bucking this trend – they sell much better in ebooks, sometimes amazingly well – would indicate this hypothesis is correct, as romance has the least gray readership.

However, these numbers, small though they are, have the industry in a tailspin. How much they’d have been in a tailspin anyway, and are simply using this to cover up their issues, I don’t know. The industry is opaque, autocratic and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere not only cut itself off from market signals, but considered this cutting off a good thing. (Economics, they iz doing it wrong.)

I’ll note in passing that Baen is having a banner year, despite some glitches with their conference, and despite the fact their ebooks aren’t available on Amazon. They do, otoh, try to stay in touch with their audience and publish what the readers want.

So for the midlister like myself the choice is scant. On the one hand the publishing industry which gave us ulcers seems to be imploding. Yay. OTOH it is no longer providing the contracts it once did and which kept us alive at least at a subsistence level. Uh Oh. On the one hand various things coming out seem to indicate that our readership really was always larger than they said. Yay. OTOH that readership doesn’t seem to be present in ebooks. The dame or the tiger. Choose, but choose now.

I’m not quite in that boat. For one I work for Baen (Yay) for another I’ve got contracts between Baen and other companies to be very busy for another year and a half (Yay) at almost my normal income (Yay.) On the other hand, a book turned in to a company not Baen three months ago has yet to be accepted/scheduled, and I have no clue what is going on since the editor is not answering me. (Uh Oh.) And payments seem to come later and later (very uh oh, and the reason – watch this space – there will be a “subscribe to Sarah” program.)

But I’m still in that boat, as I look further ahead. I have no reason to believe my relationship with Baen won’t continue. However, as per Laurell K. Hamilton (thanks Laurell) one shouldn’t work for a single publisher. Security and sanity demand spreading out the risk. Also, to be blunt, I write mystery too and the sort of dark fantasy Baen is not a good outlet for.

So, the Titanic is sinking, but I’m floating atop the grand piano.

It is my belief that as books collapse more – and they seem to be – ebooks can’t help but rise. Market abhors a vaccum. (Except Dyson.)

Because of economies of scale, I see no reason that ebooks can’t support writers. As more people self-publish it will become obvious it is NOT as widespread an ability as most people think (look at most slush piles) and also that more people are willing to read more, if their tastes – not the distributors – are catered to. It’s an underserved market.

But writers might need to write more – which I can probably do, once I’m past this tight spot of contracted books and books I really want to do for Baen and that I’m fairly sure Toni will take. I mean, I can write six books a year. Have done it. And I suspect Baen can’t take all of them, not unless this next book sells beyond all expectations and not unless Toni takes an interest in mystery or vampires (and not just to set them on fire, as per Larry Correia, though his methods are great too.)

I think writing will become as it once was, in the hallowed days of pulp. The book itself doesn’t make much money, but it stays in print forever and once you have a back list it will feed you comfortably.

Will it become that in time for me to have a healthy career? Who knows. All I know I that the field as it existed has exploded. You can’t put humpty dumpty together again.

All births are messy. All births involve blood and pain and the possibility of death for both parent and child. The solution, though, is not to try to keep the child in the womb till college (which is what some of the main stream presses seem to be betting on.) Once labor starts it has to progress. And once a baby is in there, it will have to come out (a realization that gave me the horrors five months into my first pregnancy.)

So I see nothing for it but put my shoulder under the load and heave up. Even if I’m afraid to end up as the Fallen Caryatid.

In the end it helps to remember that publishing wasn’t pushed. It threw itself down the cliff. And it is only the appearance of ebooks that allows most writers today to have hope of making a decent living someday.

All the Port Wine made it through.  The bags are semi-unpacked, their contents distributed into stacks.  I must find out if I still have furniture under the dust and cat fuzz.  Then I need to get back to work.  I hear there are people waiting for the next Darkship…

Every time I come back to Portugal I catch up on who has married/had children/divorced/died since I left. At this point the list of survivors is smaller than the list of those on the other side.

This is, of course, true of everyone. We are born to a world of adults and as we age, they age also, and die. The problem is the distance and the fact I only come back every few years.

It is a problem because the minute I get on the plane I forget all the changes. Look, it makes perfect sense. After all my mind is used to the village as it was, a place where it spent close to twenty five years. It’s much easier to return there than to the little snatches it gets for one to two weeks every few years. So every time I come back I find myself, at the back of my mind expecting to see my grandmother and to visit the places of my childhood. My grandmother is of course long dead and those places covered in cement.

What I get are slices of life that amount to one of those mainstream novels where you see people age, and the family line die out.

Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother’s best friends, who lived across the street most of my childhood and kept one of two general stores in the village, would be heartbroken to find their family line has died out without descendants, leaving their sprawling house and old garden empty and shuttered the moss-covered walls covered with “for sale” signs. Would they still have engaged as vigorously in the life of the village, sold peanuts and candy to the village children and helped build the giant bonfire every summer Solestice? Would they have worked quite so hard? Would they be sad to see their home closed and falling to ruin?

Is it a mercy they don’t know, or could they have changed their life course if they did?

These stories happen around us all the time, I know. It only affects me more because of distance, of seeing it suddenly again, and of that childhood that no one who is part of my day to day life remembers and of which these people were such an integral part. It is a question as old as time. If we could look into the future, what would we change today? And would it be good or bad?

Stories have been written about this, and I can’t add to them, or change them. I can only feel a vague melancholy about this being human thing and all its limitations.

I am, of course, for progress. Progress, understood as what makes human life easier or even more pleasant.

I have some doubts, though, about to what extent the place where I grew up has progressed or just become more unpleasant.

I cannot remember this place – not from growing up here.

Things have changed beyond recognition. It started with the highway that bisected the main road of the village in two, and in that way took out the heart of the village. Then, as the city of Porto grew to engulf it, the village bristled with stack-a-prole apartments. You find them in any country that has succumbed to socialism, particularly in the Eastern European countries – graceless and featureless concrete boxes, stacked one on the other, with perhaps the nominal balcony where the householder can allow his children to catch a gulp of non-recycled air.

Old Portuguese houses, even the very large ones built as apartments, have a certain Mediterranean charm adorned with red tile roofs and often graced with curving balconies or other small notes that lend the whole indescribable charm.

But at a certain point – I remember it – featureless concrete apartment blocks were the future, and that’s where these people wanted to go and where they hurried, after I left to the States. (I don’t want to imply I would have stopped it had I been here, but who knows. It is my considered opinion that not much can stop a determined woman with an opinion. Tanks and bulldozers tremble before a woman with her hands at her waist and an expression of sullen determination.) These apartment blocks are everywhere, facing other apartment blocks, with only the occasional park here and there, with maybe a dozen stunted trees.

I remember growing up in the village and spending time exploring the abandoned Roman gold mines amid the pine forests. Now the pine forests themselves have disappeared and the mines are, presumably, buried under these “developments.” I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like to be a kid in one of these apartment blocks.

They’ll find it natural, I suppose. And probably they have tons of little friends and lead lives quite unlike my lonely childhood. But I suspect they have less freedom and their visual landscape is far empoverished.

The new schools, set amid parks, are graceless brick boxes surrounded by chain link fence, looking more like minimum security prisons than like institutions of learning. Nothing like the old, whitewashed village school with one room for girls and one for boys.

I know you’ll say – or you would if you studied the matter – that nowadays, at least, these children have bathrooms in the home and are generally cleaner and better fed than we were. I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.

I read enough stories of people growing up in NYC in the early twentieth century to know one can learn to love an arid cityscape – even as a small child. But these apartment blocks are not set in the center of strongly linked neighborhoods nor are they even as well built as early twentieth century apartments, and I can’t help but wonder if the sterile surroundings impoverish the mind, the soul and the imagination.

Perhaps I’m just an old woman lamenting the passing of her childhood landscapes. It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.

I’d give quite a bit to walk again the streets of the old village where we knew everyone, but barring time travel that is impossible.

So I take my son down the old trails, and get lost, then find my way again as I trace it by a bit of an abandoned house, the ruined wall of a field where I once played.

You can’t go home again. At best, you can go to what remains of it, and trace it amid the present looking for bits of the past, like a blind man trying to read the faint impressions of print on a page designed for those who can see.

If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.

Crossposted at Classical Values

It is well known I have a fear of flying, which I’m doing today – though the rest of week is “canned” posts from Portugal, since I’m not getting home till Saturday (my husband and I having decided we need a little time before I must deal with house and cats.)

What I’ve probably never explained is what that fear consists of. It’s not so much a fear of falling – that is there, too, of course. I mean, it is a possibility, as is a bomb or terrorist attack. But what I’m most scared of is the loss of control I experience while flying. I’d not feel much different if I were taking a long distance train (which I did, a lot, in my younger days) or bus.

It will perhaps surprise a lot of people that I am a control freak. In my defense I am a control freak of a peculiar and localized kind. I couldn’t care less what other people do, for instance, or if they do things in the “one way I approve of.” Once my kids reached the age of being self-propelled and fairly reasonable, provided they behave like human beings, do their share of chores and do well at school, I couldn’t care less if in their own private time they choose to sleep crosswise on the bed or scratch their ear with their big toe. If their rooms are relatively clean (no rotting food, no trash on the floor and no bugs) I don’t even much care how they arrange their furniture or what they choose to display on their shelves. Ditto the way they dress. Many people at conventions seem to believe I make them wear button downs. Frankly I’d prefer they wear t-shirts as they don’t need ironing. But they like button downs and the inconvenience to me is minimal, so that’s fine. In fact, some people would call me rather slapdash when it comes to controlling my family. I never even consider controlling my friends – though I reserve the right to argue with or tease them about their choices.

So in what way am I a control freak? Me. I like to control me, my immediate surroundings and my decisions. I have never done drugs, because I like to be in control of my own mind. Illnesses annoy me (as did the excessive weight I’ve struggled with) because, curse it all, I should be able to control m own body. I don’t like roller coasters because I can’t control the way they roll. When I was very little, I used to pull my own milk teeth, as opposed to letting an adult pull them with string or otherwise, because I preferred to control the pain. Frankly, still, if I must do something which will hurt or be unpleasant, I’d rather do it to myself.

Because of this I prefer to drive myself, though I seem to have accepted my husband and son as extensions of the self (probably because I can nag them.)

Airplane travel, particularly when involving three plane changes, has way too much control in other people’s hands, particularly in the time of National Security issues. I can’t even get up when the air hostess would rather I sat down, even if I have a very, very good reason, such as a poisonous lizard down my pants. (How would I know how a poisonous lizard got on the plane? It could!)

On top of that there’s other considerations. The bureaucracy involved is mind boggling. For instance, the computers of Usairways and TAP don’t talk to each other, and since I’m leaving (have left, by the time you read this) Porto headed for Lisbon on a TAP plane, I have a boarding pass only for the first flight, after which I must navigate a strange airport (trust me, being from the North, I find Lisbon VERY strange) and get boarding passes for the next two flights, all in about an hour and a half (so cross fingers the plane is not late.) Once I’ve landed for my connection in the states (should be close if not already there by the time this post goes up) I will feel better, since I have a measure of control: even if planes are grounded, I can rent a car and drive home to Colorado. Mind you, I’ll hate it like poison, but not as much as I’d hate being stranded away from my husband.

So, send kind thoughts my way, that today’s travels go well. It always seems to be that the travel to Portugal is fraught, but the travel back is glitch-less. (Except for their losing my bags occasionally, though even that not often.) Let’s hope this holds.

I miss home, I miss my husband, I miss my cats, I miss my friends; I miss diners and having access to the internet when I feel like it; I miss my office and my keyboard and my coffee maker; I miss my walks around the neighborhood and the way th light slants through the trees in the park; I miss my treadmill; I miss my art desk; I miss the Natu… wait Denver Museum of Nature and Science; I miss the aquarium, the zoo and the Denver Museum of Art.

I guess sometimes you need to travel half around the world to find out you’re a homebody after all.

I was reading a book about pre-historic Indo-European cultures – actually a book about paleo-linguistics – which described, as an important part of the indo-European culture, the giving of large banquets in which long poems praising the feast-giver were recited and conferred status both upon the reciter and the feast-giver.

I suspect though of course there is no way to prove it, that elements of these have survived in sagas like the Iliad and the Odyssey. And perhaps it is because Western culture is descended from those early horse riders possibly from the Steppes (there are other hypothesis) that our literature is the form it is.

It doesn’t take a more arcane activity than watching Anime or reading Manga to understand that the literary tradition in Asian countries, venerable and well developed though it is, doesn’t tend to follow the same framework as ours. As for other lands, particularly those that were not literate when they first came in contact with Europeans, their stories can seem almost alien to us.

It’s not that telling stories is a mark of civilization – it is not, to paraphrase Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, any savage can tell stories – but that the stories we tell both are molded by and mold us into what we are.

The shift in interest from science fiction to fantasy seems to have come at a time when we moved out of what could be called the “steam punk civilization” – which wasn’t, of course, as it lasted well into the late fifties – where someone who was smart enough could master the principles of a scientific trade at home with books and determination. Instead, we were faced with a civilization that, to the average person, might as well be magic. Curiously, fantasy was most popular amid the people who should by rights know how to assemble a computer from scratch (and many of whom did.) Possibly because to assemble a computer we already need sophisticated components, which are, in themselves a form of “magic.”

Myself I think we need more science fiction, and have thought so for a while. And while I don’t object to hard science fiction that explains the insides of machines and how they work, (I enjoy it, if I’m in the mood for it) I think mostly we need science fiction that explains how society changes under technological impact, and by doing so prepares us for that change.

Look, when cloning happened it was a non-event for the science fiction reading public, even as it was a nine-day wonder to those who had never read science fiction. And the idea, so odd it amounted to nothing less than the possibility of reproducing humans without sex, left people who were prepared completely rational and able to cope with the situation. Meanwhile the non readers were having nightmares.

We’re changing now even faster than I expect and I think we need more and better science fiction to prepare people. Like those early sagas, this could prepare our civilization and make it strong and supple for the fast change ahead, giving civilization to withstand pressures that might otherwise break it.

The difficulty has been, for a long time, that publishers thought science fiction doesn’t sell. A certain type doesn’t, of course and it could be argued it’s the type they themselves favor. To sell any story has to be entertaining.

But in the fraught times ahead, I think we need science fiction writers skilled enough to attract the reading public back to the idea that a fast changing world can be wondrous rather than traumatic.

It is of course entirely possible I’m barking up the wrong tree…

Crossposted at Mad Genius Club

Returning to Portugal for a visit has both the effect of skipping forward and watching only the high points of a movie (I’ve now reached the rueful age when I can ask my mother “tell me which of my elementary school classmates died since I’ve last been here) and the effect of re-examining my childhood by viewing it as an adult and an outsider.

To an extent I suspect I was always an outsider. Like many of my SF/F writing and reading breathren I was a stranger in a strange land, forever moving amid familiar landscapes that might be dear but didn’t become any more understandable for knowing them very well.

But now I am faced with various things that would probably never have come to mind had I stayed and lived here – things like, now that I visit as my own sons are almost grown – realizing that things I viewed as imutable and the laws of the Persians and Medes, were not only not “family traditions” as something my parents decided to do and continued doing because they liked them, but also that they have not continued once I – the youngest child by 9 years – was out of the house.

Nothing particularly important, mind, but things like cleaning the house from top to bottom on Friday. Or holding Sunday dinner for all the various spread-out relatives in my parents’ house. Or…

It occurred to me today to wonder whether that’s part of the difference between first borns and second and subsequent children. I don’t know about you, but when we got married, we were making it up as we went along. I will say even now we’re not very good at falling into a routine, witness the fact we move every seven to eight years. But after we’ve been in the Front Range for almost 20 years, we’ve developed favorite places and places we do so and so at at such and such a time.

My first son probably still remembers when we were learning our way and making things up as we went along (possibly. He was born six years into our marriage) but to his brother these partake the way of imutable and sacred laws.

A lot of the certainties of my childhood seem to have been the same and my grandmother’s death, and my moving away by themselves changed a lot of them.

It makes me wonder about larger societal traditions and what I could romantically call “the memory of a people.” My sons, despite my explaining things, have picked up some funny notions about their ancestry and their ancestry’s habits from what I don’t say but do. And what I do is often dictated by circumstances that have long since ended.

I’m reminded of a story my host mother told me. There was a woman who had learned from her mother to prepare leg of lamb. She cut it in half lengthwise, put it in two separate baking dishes and cooked it according to what she thought was family tradition. One day her mom was visiting and the woman assured her she was still preparing leg of lamb the old way. As mom watched, she split the leg lengthwise and her mom said “What are you doing?” “Well, mom, I’m breaking the leg in half, as you always did.” To which the mom says, “But that’s only because I didn’t own a baking dish large ENOUGH.”

I wonder how many of the day to the day routines that become “the way we do things” are the result of not having dishes large enough. Which is why I like to reexamine things periodically, and make sure I haven’t become ossified. Even if it disturbs the children.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

As we were landing in Porto, after our travel (mis)adventures, my son leaned out towards the window (I always claim as right of she who gave birth, the right to the window seat) at a landscape covered in terraces, in which sit massive white or cream buildings with red tile roofs, and said “Wow, it’s like someone built a Roman Civilization in a game and brought it to today’s time.”

It is impossible to clearly explain – in a way other people would understand – how densely populated Portugal is. Let’s just say that most buildings are apartments, even in relatively rural areas such as where my parents live, and that possessing a stand alone home is a sign of wealth. Let’s also say that the only time I landed in as dense a location was when landing in NYC, and even there you can see more green around the edges.

I remember, when I was an exchange student, being taken on a bus past miles and miles of forest and half-disbelieving it. Everyone knew America was more advanced than Portugal (advanced meaning of course, more urbanized, more cosmopolitan) so how was this possible?

But it is not the elbow room – or the lack thereof – that beggars the mind. It’s the elbow room in the past. You can’t go half a kilometer without stumbling on something that remains from medieval days – sometimes properly noted, sometimes in ruins and forgotten – you can’t walk down the street without stumbling on a statue commemorating some event or other. The only thing even vaguely approaching this are the older parts of Philadelphia and for in comparison they’re virtually amnesiac.

Portugal is steeped in history, ankle deep in its currents. Echoes of events unimaginably old to the average American reverberate through everyday life. The design of Roman farmhouses (some of them still bearing the lintel piece identifying a legionary ancestor and the Emperor who gave him the land at the end of his term of service) is overlaid in tile in designs brought to the Peninsula by its Arab occupiers. The carving of ropes and anchors around a farmhouse window reminds you of the lost glories of the discoveries.

Someone said in response to my bookstore post that perhaps Anglo-Saxons were more obsessed with history. This is not true so much as most Portuguese don’t view history so much as something to study as as something that IS. It would be like taking a degree in air and breathing, if you get my meaning. The histories I’ve found are either painfully generic or of the involved, detail-obsessed sort “history of the castle of a little village of no importance from nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday the thirteenth of August of 1234 to seven PM on Sunday the 12^th of April of 1246.” Also, they tend to ignore the rest of the world in their inward turning, so I had to learn the story of the castle that sits in the center of the village where I grew up from an internet site run by a British couple. (Turns out it was built as a playhouse for the daughter of a local farmer. I knew it was not a “real” castle, but I lacked the story.) And it was a book in the US that revealed to me the history of the mother of Henry The Navigator, that Portuguese queen known around here only as Phillipa of Lancastre.”

I think I got my first notion of the existence of such a thing as history when taking walks with my dad through the fields and forests around here. We’d stumble on inscriptions, demarcation stones, ruins, and many times they identified themselves in Latin, in ancient Greek, or in more recent (but archaic) versions of Portuguese. It had to wait, though, till I saw pictures of this region from above on the net, to figure out that my grandmother’s assertion that the forests had “always” been there was in fact wrong. It is clear those forests grew over abandoned fields, farms and villages, some dating probably to one of the many invasions, some more recent, like the ones left vacant by the black plague or one of the economic contractions the country suffers through with metronome-like regularity.

Portugal is not only incredibly densely populated by American standards, it is, in fact, built on Portugal.

I remember, though I no longer can do this, living as though time were another dimension – locating myself not just by WHERE I am but WHEN I am, and knowing, as far as I could everything that happened in that space in at least the last millennium – feeling all the past generations and their struggles. It was something less than psychic visions and something more than mere knowing what had happened. It felt like an extra dimension in the world, if that makes sense.

I can no longer do it because though America has history and even pre-history, it is not of the same sort, not as densely packed, not unavoidable. The closest I came to it was while walking around Dinosaur Ridge, in Colorado.

The feeling it induces is akin to walking by the ocean and feeling its immensity dwarf you and knowing that it was there before you were and it will be there when you’re long gone. It makes you feel very small and very unimportant, but at the same time it also makes your current problems seem negligible as you pause in the presence of something bigger than you.

Unfortunately for Portugal I think it also acts as a ball and chain of sorts. To know that almost everything has been tried, and what you have is the current mess means most people don’t try.

Not that this is why I left for America. I left because ya’ll seduced me by flashing a bit of Constitution, a lot of personal freedom and the swelling mountains of “can do” spirit.

But sometimes I wonder if America will eventually become like Portugal – bowed under the weight of history, warming itself by the fire of past achievements and dreaming of long gone times.

I don’t think this is now, yet. I think we’re more likely to be suffering growth pangs. I don’t think our senescence will come till I’m long in my grave and one of those whose ghostly achievements (I hope) haunt my yet unborn descendants.

And for that I’m glad.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

(A guest post by my friend, Doctor Tedd Roberts, whom I thank for doing this.)

I am a scientist.  In a very real way I write for a living.  My Curriculum Vitae lists over 75 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, over 10 chapters in books, and hundreds of meeting abstracts and presentations.  I have written more than 30 research grant applications – about half have been funded, requiring annual or even quarterly progress reports.  Each journal article runs to about 15,000 words, book chapters to 20-25,000, grant applications and progress reports are only between 5,000-10,000 words each.  If all of these were converted to short stories or novels, I would have “sold” around 15-20 books-worth of material and been ranked among the more prolific fiction writers by this point in my career, and spent more time “on stage” than most movie stars (or TV, maybe, but it doesn’t approach theater and stage appearance). 

Scientific writing takes a lot of time.  The fiction writers I know spend a lot of time either researching or “ideating” to get the story right in their head, then sit down and pound out 10-15,000 words in a long weekend. Granted, they usually have a target of 120,000 words for a novel and typically cannot keep up that pace until completion; six months for a good draft seems typical.  For me to perform the work necessary for a 15,000 word journal article takes *at least* 6 months.  First the experiments are run – mostly by my technical staff, but I am involved in all of the planning and analysis – then the data is analyzed, charted and graphed, statistics calculated, and I can start to write.  I can get 15,000 words written in a week if I have no other duties, but the work of a professor usually doesn’t allow that.  I have to do most of my writing late at night, when the house is quiet and I am the only one awake. Then comes the editing and re-writing as I pass the manuscript over to a colleague who will approach it from a different perspective.  Meanwhile I remake figures, and run new analyses since I usually realize that the results are incomplete, but I didn’t realize it until I tried to write them.  Meanwhile I am also reading recent papers by scientists in related fields so that I can cite the appropriate comparisons to existing scientific literature when I finish writing the discussion of the paper.  So, six months is optimistic; the more appropriate comparison is 6 months to perform experiments, 2 months to analyze, 4 months to write and edit the manuscript.  *If* it is accepted to a scientific journal without the need for extensive changes, I will not see it in print for a year or more! 

Yes, this is very much like the life of a fiction writer, and it’s my day job. SO, why is it that I find myself wanting to write Science Fiction?

Well, part of it is because I *read* Science Fiction, and quite often despair over the misuse of science in books, TV and movies.  Dr. Travis Taylor says he started writing because he complained loudly about books and TV that were poorly written, and claimed that he could write better.  His wife told him to “put up or shut up.” Five solo novels and six collaborations later, “Doc Travis” is a respected SF writer.

Do I think I could do that?  Well, no, frankly, for all I know, Doc doesn’t sleep.  I do not have that much time in my day; and as I have written elsewhere, my mind can either write science, or fiction.  I find myself unable to alternate my writing between professional and recreational topics.  Once I get an idea for what *I* think would be a good story, I have to clear time to put aside my professional writing and finish the story.  Otherwise, I have to stop the story in mid-thought, so to speak, and will have trouble picking it up later.

Don’t get me wrong, I *do* have story ideas.  I have 5 novel-length stories blocked and outlined, I have even written about 20,000 words each in two of them.  I have 5 short stories and 2 novelettes written and ready for submission, five more in various states of completion, and a nonfiction book nearing completion.  It’s just that I understand that I may never complete the long-form fiction before I retire from the day job.  I read the words of advice of authors – I know not to give up the day job for the insecurity of a fiction writing career.  I know that for my own purposes, I need a secure base and plenty of time before I can devote the effort that I know it will take to be able to write at the professional SF/F level – let alone be able to *sell* any of these pieces.

But I *am* a writer.  I am published.  My record is envious even within my field.  SO why do I feel a need to write?  Perhaps it is because I am a teacher.  I have taught preschool age kids in Sunday school, elementary through high-school as a substitute teacher, college undergraduate & graduate laboratory as a graduate student, and medical and graduate students as a professor.  I don’t teach much know, but I enjoy – not always, I had to *learn* how to teach – but I enjoy it when I can.  As the first in my family to earn a degree in a medical field, I have been called on as “interpreter” to explain what the doctor said to all members of my extended family.  I am asked questions by writers to explain some aspect of science and/or medicine in a way that makes it easy to fit into a story.  Then there’s that little bit about despairing that writers and Hollywood will ever get brain science right.  My compromise between the science-writing and fiction-writing halves of my brain is a blog, and eventual book, which explains brain science in layman’s terms.

And again – why write SF?  Perhaps the best, the most important reason, is that I tell stories.  When I teach, I tell a story that seeks to lead young minds to understanding and knowledge.  When I write science, I tell a story of mystery, detective work, and discovery.  When my children were very young, my wife and I read and sang to them every night.  When their grandparents visited, they also joined the routine.  My mother-in-law sang children’s songs, my father-in-law had a wonderful style of recitation for classic poetry, my mother snuggled and sang and read – but my father told *stories*!  Not experience or personal events – no, my father made up stories on the spot, and the kids were riveted.  My Dad could make *any* simple topic into a fantastic adventure.  *He* is a storyteller, and I guess I inherited that from him.

So I write stories, and tell stories.  It seems to be a common feature, that humans are natural storytellers – some get up on stage, others write it down, and some stories never make it out of the imagination.  In ancient times, people made up stories about the constellations and patterns in the sky.  Cave drawings tell a story, as does oral history.  Science is a story, a story of how things work and in some cases, how we *want* them to work.  Writing stories means I have to give up a few things to do so: a bit of family time, a bit of sleep, even reading more SF.  Do I think I can do it better?  Not necessarily – but to quote Sinatra – I know I can do it “My Way.”

Yesterday while in the car on the way to the seaside, my son remarked that all Portuguese songs are sad. While this is a gross generalization, it is true that most, and perhaps the best, Portuguese songs partake a note of wishfulness or sadness.

You can find the same note vibrating through the poetry and novels, even those that are ostensibly cheerful. This is how, in the same way, it took until well into the late eighties for Americans to master the “nevermind” novel Europeans specialize in. Unlike their European counterparts, Americans always feel as though there is a solution to everything.

It is that feeling that impels our “can do” spirit. P.J. O’Rourke in describing the dismal conditions in a restaurant in the newly fallen Soviet Union/new Russia said that an American with a couple of rags and a bottle of windex would set it all to rights.

It is not imperial aspirations, despite what a lot of our intellectuals think, that lead us to do this, but the rock-bottom belief that every problem has a solution and that the solution can’t be much farther to seek than the next average Joe with a will and a plan. (The endless wait for “experts” is part of the European disease, but more on that later.)

While visiting here, I have to repress a thousand times a day the wish to set something straight that is crooked, clean something that is dirty, straighten something that is fallen. But there is not much point. It would be perceived as, if not “imperial” at least as intrusive. And I’m only here for two weeks and would much prefer not to make enemies. So I endure it, as do those who are submerged in the population and who wish the could straighten and clean and fix. I’m sure that the mix is about the same there and there, of those who prefer to let things be, and those who would improve them. The difference is one of, for lack of a better term, the national soul.

If nations have souls, America is the young man setting out into the world. It has had some smacks on the nose and a couple of pratfalls, but it’s still hopeful and knows the future is bright ahead. On the other hand Portugal….

Portugal as I told my son, has been part of three lost empires – real empires, not the imagined American Empire: Carthage, Rome and their own empire, all of them have vanished. And now Portugal is like the old person sitting in the corner, reminiscing on bygone glories.

Perhaps this is appropriate for a country where demographics has tilted and where in 25 years they expect the population to be halved. (Mind you for a country of old people, they all drive like bats out of hell… OTOH, so do the old people in my neighborhood.)

The problem, perhaps compounded by a melancholy walk around the area, pointing out to my son the remains (mostly ruins) of the village I knew, is that I’m having issues writing space opera. Space Opera is a quintissential American genre. I’ve read French and Portuguese space operas and they fail to convince at the gut level. Here, surrounded by the remains of past grandeur, I find myself wanting to write the sort of epic fantasy that starts with “Let me tell you of the lost city on the edge of the congealed sea….”