Category: Uncategorized

I hope you forgive me having been absent from the blog.  I´d have managed earlier, but we were delayed in travel. It seems inevitable that when taking three flights in a row, one of them international, at least one flight will be late enough to moot all your other reservations.

In this case, I found myself stranded in Madrid for twelve hours.

Someone on Facebook informed me that Madrid is a beautiful city and I should have gone to the prado.  I appreciate the tip, except that I was restricted to the airport, tied down by luggage and other such considerations, not the least being that I was afraid the city would prove as infuriating as the airport.

The experience was sort of similar to landing in Chicago at two in the morning  –we were pointed in a general direction, given no instructions, could find neither personnel nor a screen with information and wandered long corridors in an experience reminiscent of rats seeking cheese.

Airports are always at best a miserable experience, designed for so many people coming from so many locations that itºs not comfortable for anyone.  In this case we had maximum inconvenience complicated by language barriers.  (I understand Spanish, but Spaniards seemed to understand neither Portuguese nor English.)

Yes, I know I sound like a spoiled American.  Iºll cop to the charge.  I think the patience with which people endure poor service and insane behavior on the part of those in any form of authority (and of course airport employees have authority of a sort over jet-lagged, dislocated travelers) breeds more insane behavior, erratic service and capricious rudeness.

I could be wrong, but I know that if any airport in the states were that bad, people would be avoiding it in droves.

At any rate we survived, though sleepless and comfortless.  I am just about recovered now, and hope to resume daily blogging.  Hopefully on more interesting subjects than airport complaints next time.

And fortunately on the way back my connections will be Lisbon and Philly, where I at least speak both languages and — by and large — the natives understand me.

The difficulties of serving two masters are well known, whether they be G-d and Mamon or more pedestrian entities, such as a family and a career.

It is an aphorism in espionage that no one trusts a double agent, possibly not even the agent himself.

However, until very recently, this was the absolute sine-qua-non of being a working writer. to publish, you needed to please the editors/publishers. To sell, after that, you needed to please the public.

Of course editors and publishers would tell you that they picked the stuff that would sell. (Waggles hand.) Most of the time, the truth is that they either had no idea what the popular taste was, or stood at a dignified distance, shaking their heads at it.

There are exceptions. Baen, as always, in part because of the bar, where publisher, authors and fans rubbed elbows in equality, had a good inkling what its market was and hit it square on most of the time. The other houses were hazier.

For a long time, I think the tastes were congruent or close enough. But in the late twentieth century, with all the publishing houses in NYC, and all the editors coming from the same general background – usually liberal arts, prestigious college – and the business managers being corporate entities, divorced from the day to day running of the business and its consequences, the tastes became at times two very different things. This is where the editors came from who thought their job was to educate the public. (Hint – you’re supposed to SELL to the public. All else is secondary.)

Because I’m one of those writers who can do both “literature” (It’s not, but it can pass) and normal, fun books I quickly became aware that the public as manifest at signings, fan letters and the occasional offer to have my baby, liked the second kind. The editors (and a lot of agents) OTOH preferred the first. They wanted to feel like they were facilitating/publishing something “important.”

After a while I learned to walk the line. Put in just enough literary/historical references (a certain number seem to happen spontaneously) to sell the book to NYC and keep it fun enough to sell to the fans. All while – yes – trying to serve my inner drive and need to express a specific story.

Did I succeed? I often listed madly one way or the other.

In the brave new world where authors sell directly to the public, how will that change the character of the books? I don’t believe it means all writing will be drivel. Neither do I believe that all of it will be worthy. But I confess I’m very curious to see how things work out.

(I’m going to be en-route to Portugal for the next twelve hours or so, and after that my access to the net will also be erratic for about two weeks. I intend to keep up my daily posting, but the hours – particularly given my tendency to calculate time zones backwards – might become very interesting.)

Three days ago, I took it upon myself to dispute the conclusions of Michael Levin writing in the Forbes blog and prophesying the end of the book. Not just the end of the paper book, or the end of the book as we know it, but the end of the book, period.

He seemed to believe it was at least in part suicide, with the publishers choosing to publish a lot of things that no one really wanted to buy, and – as it were – metaphorically standing at the end of the abyss saying “stop me before I jump.” In this scenario, Amazon came along and gave the final shove.

Perhaps because economics is my hobby, I tend to look at the same scenario – and I’ll admit Michael is right – grosso modo – about the scenario – and see the free market at work. Or perhaps more accurately, the iron law of economics at work: if there is a market that’s being badly served and someone else comes up with a way to serve it better, the model will chance and the old way of doing things die out. Or in other words (sorry, writing this late at night after a day spent packing for two weeks abroad) if you build a better mousetrap the manufacturers of inferior mousetraps will go out of business.

So far so good. What I disagreed – and disagree – with is the disappearance of the book as such. Michael, who, it turns out, is a good sport and didn’t even get upset at my calling him Mark – Okay, didn’t get VERY upset – (It’s something I do to Michaels. My friend Michael Kabongo has been for some time “Tony” to our circle of friends. No, he doesn’t like it, so I wouldn’t advise trying it.) but his comment in the “about” section of my blog clarified his argument.

Dear Sarah,

Many thanks for reading and responding so passionately to my piece about publishing in Forbes. The reality is that there are more of them than there are of you and me, in that you and I pay for content and others don’t, or won’t in the future. Maybe I’m as wrong as you say. But my first name is Michael, not Mark, so perhaps we both have a right to be wrong! I enjoyed your piece and am glad that you saw fit to write about it. Warmly, Mark no wait Michael

(I think by “passionately” he means that I’m excitable. That’s fine. I am. My husband says so, and he knows me quite well.)

His next statement however raises eyebrows. For more on this, look at the Baen Free Library. Also, note that Baen has long run its ebook section on low prices and no DRM and far from having a loss continues to thrive.

For yet more corroboration that piracy alone won’t kill an industry, look at music. Yes, it’s completely different from before going electronic, but again, provided the price is reasonable and there’s no DRM you’ve eliminated two reasons to pirate: costs, and because it’s a challenge. Music for money still exists and it still supports artists.

The caveat here is that Michael works, mostly, in non fiction. I’m not sure of the mechanics for non-fiction. I know in fiction, most people have an instinctive understanding that only this writer could produce this work, and if the writer starves in his lonely little attic, you won’t have any more… Honor, or Athena, or Captain Vimes, or…

I’m not sure the same understanding applies to non fiction. It’s entirely possible that people just assume there’s no intrinsic virtue to how-to or non-fic, that the info was there, if anyone else had collected. Non-fic might fall under the misguided aprehension that “data wants to be free.”

Also, because some non fic, at least (school books) is unlikely to crawl out from under the thumb of the big houses any time soon, it will probably be overpriced and DRMed to the gills.

So Michael might be right. It might be the end of a TYPE of book. I don’t think so, but I’ll concede the point that on THAT I have no other proof than a gut feeling that once people realize the stuff you can get for free is worth what you pay for it, they will realize non-fic writers need to live also.

However, as I told Michael Levin, in my answer to his comment, the future is notoriously hard to make predictions about, particularly when it hasn’t happened, yet. I will admit for non-fic he might very well be right, which means the market will transmute to another media. I’m going to guess specialized how-to and non-fic blogs, probably supported by contributions.

(I’m going to be en-route for the next thirty six hours or so, and after that my access to the net will also be erratic for about two weeks. I intend to keep up my daily posting, but the hours – particularly given my tendency to calculate time zones backwards – might become very interesting.)

It never rains but it pours.  I woke up at five am with a screaming cat in the hallway — Euclid, being neurotic, which falls under his job description.

Immediatley afterwards, I realized I was in pain.  One of my teeth has been feeling weird for a while, but nothing approaching pain — I’d actually describe it as “encased in cork” if that makes sense.  Well…  it started hurting in the middle of the night, and it is a tooth anchoring a bridge, so it’s not something I can get easilly done in Portugal.  (Yes, I know those are supposed to be dead through root canal first, only this one has already had two go rounds.)

Appointment with doctor — for which I do not have the time — in about an hour.

Afterwards, I’ll try to do what I can in terms of packing/laundry/etc.  It’s going to be a long day, particularly if I end up spending the afternoon in emergency dental surgery.

THIS is the kind of luck I battle against…

Yesterday I answered a series of interview questions for Literary Lunes Magazine. This happened with a lot of other “business catching up” which had to be done before I go to Portugal, since there I’ll only have intermittent internet access, when I visit my brother’s house. My mom appears to think the internet is the work of the devil or something.

Anyway, among those interviews there was one I’ve never been asked, and which UTTERLY baffled me. “What is you muse?”

I had no idea how to answer that, so I went flip – which, you know, is what I do when I have no clue what people are talking about. I said if I had a muse, she’d wear a toga and lift aloft a clothes iron, because I do most of my ideation while ironing or doing other boring, routine tasks.

I’m still bothered by what they mean. Perhaps they asked “who” (I don’t remember) but that only makes it more baffling. When I wrote poetry, this was easy, since I usually wrote series of poems to someone, normally my crush of the time. (Sigh. Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?)

But I don’t write poetry and I don’t write straight romance (I don’t write gay romance, either – I mean, as you know very well that I don’t write romance on its own, not as part of a bigger plot.) So the question of a muse doesn’t arise. Or does it?

Of course I fall a little in love with my characters, but not that sort of love. It’s more the love of parent for child, or the love of creator for creation.

Sometimes a book does center around one character, though. It’s not – I think – so much a matter of “love” or even “muse” but more a matter of following the pain. I write to the pain. I go where the pain is.

I think this is because I write to resolve pain – to resolve conflicts within myself that can’t be resolved any other way, starting, inevitably, with the fight between mind and body, but twisting to a lot of other things. And if you’re scratching your head and wondering what I mean by pain – to take an example, I know that I’m not the only one who left her native land behind. Half the members of the Mad Genius Club have. And I’ll admit I wanted to be here, and I’m happy where I live and with my family and friends here. But at the same time, every time I go back, I remember I severed a piece of myself and left it behind – a whole parallel history that was more likely to happen, the person I’d be if I’d married someone there and lived there. It hurts a little not to be able to be in two places at once, no matter how much you love where you are.

But I’m not alone. Even if you never left your birth place and your birth family, I bet the world has changed so much around you that your childhood is as irretrievably lost as my own. It’s part of being a physical, mortal creature caught in the coils of advancing time. No human being deserves that, and all of us live through it. And there’s no way to resolve it, to come to terms with it. Except through art. At least for me. And my art is mostly my writing (the rest being on the lines of a hobby.)

So I go where the pain is. I find the pain in the character, the situation, the world, and the tension that comes from that pain, and I go in and wind the plot around the pain till catharsis happens.

This is the closest thing to a “muse” I can admit to, and it makes me sound like I keep a closet full of whips and chains. (I don’t, though the cats sometimes make me wish for a whip and a chair. Yeah, I know they’d just play with the leather strips.)

So what do you think they meant by “muse”? It made me feel completely out of step, like there was an entire world of writing out there that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t fathom. After twenty six years of writing, that is a pretty scary idea.

Does everyone but me have a muse? What is a muse in this context? Do you have one?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club *

Michael Levin at Forbes announced the coming end of books

http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/05/20/are-books-an-endangered-species/

The publishing world gathers next week in Manhattan at BookExpo America, its annual trade show, but the one subject attendees won’t be discussing is the coming collapse of publishing and the inevitable disappearance of books.

Like other prophets announcing the end is coming, Mark Levin is wrong. Books are not disappearing. In fact, we might be entering the most vibrant time ever in publishing.

Oh, almost everything he says will sound intuitively right to people of a certain age, even those who work in the field. By people of a certain age, I mean people over say fifty five. Not all of them, but most of them. Ten years ago, on email lists with these authors, who are my elder colleagues in the field, I struggled to convince them that a) Amazon wasn’t a passing fad. b) Amazon was far more significant than anything – ANYTHING – they’d seen so far. They kept talking about browsing and serving coffee and bookstore cats and the virtues of brick and mortar. Oh, and the ineffable romanticism of the smell of paper or the feel of pages or something….

I get a feeling those people STILL have no idea why or how Amazon succeeded. They certainly don’t seem to have a grasp of how the rest of us use it. And then there’s the other side of it, the “the books are disappearing” side of it, which will seem intuitive to most people in the industry who never had ANY connection to their readers. We’re writers. We tend to run in flocks. Writers and wanna be writers naturally become the most vocal ones even in online reader forums – ALMOST all online reader forums.

Before I started being published by Baen I THOUGHT that the only people reading me were people looking to get published. Now that is not true, at least not for Baen readers, a good number of whom are “just readers” but the normal writer might not bump into many of those.

So, he’s wrong on two counts – how Amazon and ebooks are changing the game and what the game IS. He’s right – very right – on other things, like the model of publishing a bunch of books, promoting very few of them and blaming all failures on the writer himself. He just fails to take the logical conclusions from this.

The reason that publishing functioned the way he says it did – with publishers publishing an enormous amount of things that no one wanted to read – is that by the mid nineties, at least, publishers had managed to completely insulate themselves from market feedback. What do I mean by that? Surely they knew what sold and didn’t sell?

Well, yes to an extent. It will shock anyone outside the field to know that in fact there are several systems for ESTIMATING how many copies sell, but no system – not even point of sale – that covers every book sold. The best systems cover between 1/3 and 2/3 of the market – the composition varying depending on the type of book and where it’s stocked.

But – you’re saying by now – they know how many books they printed and how many returned, right? Well… maybe. Sometimes. For a given value of “know.” First of all there’s the lovely returns system. Books are not sold to the bookstores who stock them, they’re put on consignment. It used to be that books were “stripped” and the front covers mailed back. (The rest was in theory, but rarely in practice, discarded. More often sold for $1 on some discount rack.) That at least in theory allowed for some counting. But sometime along the line books were just virtually stripped, and a certain number virtually “returned”… by entering the numbers into a computer. Add to this that since at least the late nineties most publishers have been working on a de-facto Print On Demand basis. This is because of some government regulation counting inventory as tools and supplies and taxing publishers on inventory sitting in warehouses.

I have no idea what contract the publishers have with printers, but in my contracts – pretty much all of them  except Baen– it says print runs under some amount – say 100, though I think it’s more normally 500 – they don’t count as a new print run and don’t have to be reported.

So, imagine my laydown is 2000 (unfortunately not a rare, non-pushed print run.) Of those 500 are virtually returned (true or not, who knows? Do you assume every bookstore employee is not only scrupulously honest but very good at entering numbers? I don’t.) However, meanwhile another 3000 are printed and sent out in thirty 100 shipments. Of those, 1000 are “returned”.

The two most reputable tracking services variously report 1000 sales and 500 sales. This could mean anywhere between 1500, 3000 and possibly 4000 sales. Or it could mean the reported ones were the only ones you actually sold and the rest was lost in the cracks. What the heck does the accounting department at the house do? How do they pick the number you “sold”? Is it surprising that people report exactly the same number of sales across various houses? I’m sure they use a formula. And I’m sure the formula favors the house, of course.

Add to this that sometime in the nineties Borders introduced computers to control inventory and invented the concept of “stocking to the net.” This means they order as many books for their shelves as the number you sold before. This leads almost inevitably to the death spiral. I.e. bookstores ordered (and stocked) ten of your books last time. Seven of those sold (this btw, is an unusually high order if not pushed. And the time books stay on the shelves before being culled has shrunk to something like four weeks. If you’ve sold seven in that time, you’re doing well.) So for the next book they order seven and sell four. For the next book they order four… You can see where this is going. When it reaches zero, you, the writer, who are to blame for this, of course, have to change your name or quit writing.

Now, I can see where this system gave Borders a huge advantage when they were a small chain in Michigan.  They would still — of course — order authors who made it big AFTER they banned them.  But for the average author, it prevented their stocking “things no one reads.”  I mean, there were still other places for authors to make it big, and to return to those few bookstores with big numbers that resisted the “ordering to the net” bane. I can’t for the life of me understand what possessed the rest of the field to follow suit, or even Borders to extend it nationally. Surely it is obvious to anyone not lobotomized that this would lead to every author not receiving publisher-ex-machina extraordinary help being kept out of the market. But apparently bookstores didn’t see this.

For editors OTOH this was a happy time. Look, as far as I know, publishing has always moved by fads. For instance, there was the whole gothic romance thing in the eighties. Something sold and then they bought all of it. And for a time all of it sold. But the fads weren’t completely divorced from public taste. The bookstores/market acted as a check on that. The publishers could “push” a book to an extent, but there were always bestsellers that flopped completely and books that weren’t pushed at all that made a runaway success in independent bookstores. Did I mention that by the late nineties most independents were dead or dying? And that distribution took place through three distributors?

Why was this a happy time? Well, because most editors don’t care how well a book sells. They care how closely they predicted how a book would sell. When they first decide to buy a book, they have to decide how much advance to pay and have to take these figures to “meeting”. The figures are based on what the author has sold in the past, what the books are, how those books have sold in the past, and, oh, yeah… the editor’s intuition. Or something. It should be clear to everyone by now that these projections are more art than science. After all, books are not cans of beans. You can’t say “A hundred people will eat beans in this town this week.” For instance, I read an awful lot of mystery, fantasy and science fiction, but just because a book says something like that on the spine it doesn’t mean I’ll like it. Heck, even my favorite authors wrote two or three books I hated.

So it’s risky for the editor to make these projections. And it looks good if the projections work out.

By the mid nineties most books sold exactly till what was owed the author was what he/she had been paid in advance. And then the book was taken out of print.

Precision of this sort in forecasting the uncertain is only possible if the producer takes the bit between his/her teeth and controls how much the book sells. This was possible by controlling distribution. Here the whole concept of “push” came in and bookstores started charging publishers for special displays for the books – end caps, dumps – as well as engaging in convoluted quid pro quo. The publisher who wanted to make sure an author who got a big advance did well could, for instance, offer a discount on a bestseller (or threaten to cut the bestseller’s laydown with that store) if they took also 100 books from promising author X.

So, by … oh, even five years ago, books were like late-stage USSR. They were completely a command economy, where what the consumers wanted didn’t matter nearly as much as the internal numbers and the validation of the bureaucracy and career bureaucrats.

However, by five years ago this was already being undermined by Amazon. Amazon affected me most, first, as a reader. To understand how much or how, you have to understand how I read. I’m a high volume near-indiscriminate reader. If this were done with anything else, I’d be considered addicted. I have to read before sleeping, for instance. I have to read at breakfast. I’ll read the back of a cereal box, medicine instructions or wanted adds if that’s all I can find. HOWEVER in every genre and subgenre “I know what I like when I see it.” Let’s take mystery: I read cozies, police procedurals and woman in peril. I read thrillers, historicals and humor. HOWEVER I don’t read “Chic Lit” in any of those varieties. It’s nothing against the people who do, but I’m in my late forties, it’s been a long time since I dated and I don’t live for shoes.

Throughout most of the nineties, when the kids were little, our normal vacations were in Denver, then about an hour and a half from where we lived. The vacations usually lasted three days and started with a swoop by the new/used bookstore where I NEVER spent less than $250 and walked out usually with three bags full of books. These books then got devoured while taking the kids to the amusement park, or sitting under shade trees watching them play, or reading in the hotel bed while they watched cartoons.

Sometime after 2001 I noticed that I was finding fewer books I wanted to read. I’ll tell you the blunt truth, the last time I made one of those visits, four years ago, I bought $35 worth of books, most of them replacements for books lost or destroyed.

Meanwhile in the oughts my buying from Amazon skyrocketed. Because the problem, you see, was not that there weren’t books being published that I might like to read, it is that those were not the “cool” ones that got “pushed” (which to my biased mind seemed to be mostly about sleeping with tons of guys and bitching shoes.) They just never got on the shelves. A friend of mine referred to her visits to the bookstore as “I’m going to go and be disappointed by chain name.” So I started buying on Amazon. I started as a way of finding the people the publishers weren’t pushing but who had books coming out (I read Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones before they were cool in the States, for instance.) And then I stuck around to read the “also recommends” and the books mentioned in the comments. If anything I was buying more books, a lot of them on hard cover, due to pre order. But I was buying less at brick and mortar stores, because they simply didn’t stock what I wanted.

When a supply system is completely divorced from feedback – see the late stage USSR or the late stage publishing before correction by Amazon/ebooks – you inevitably get what the people at the top think people SHOULD WANT to consume. In fact, if I had a dime for every time an editor said something like “my job is to educate the public” or “my job is to refine the public taste” I’d be buried in dimes, and I’m not a small woman. Of course their job SHOULDN’T be any of that. And in fact it wasn’t. Their job, as defined by the way they got paid more, promoted and admired was to buy books that their particular clique admired. And their clique being mostly of a uniform age, with the same type of liberal arts degrees from the same type of college and living in the same environment (NYC) their choices were amazingly uniform. One thing Mark Levin doesn’t mention are the vast quantity of pseudo literary books that are what Holly Black called “the grey goo” or something like that. No protagonist. No antagonist. No discernable plot. Basically slice of life story in the lives of Woody Allen clones minus the tantalizing quasi-incest angle. These books got the most awards, got called important, and got their editors lots of prestige. And no one bought them unless they got assigned to literature classes. Or rather, no one bought them knowing what they contained. But it was always possible to fudge numbers enough that the author sold another “important” book.

This infected even science fiction and fantasy, in their quest to be taken “seriously” and in fact, it infected almost every field, except Romance (which notably is still the best selling field.) This is because the incentive was to make the editor respected, not to make the house money.

So, is Mark Levin right? Is epublishing the end of books.

No. Not only no but HELL NO. It might be the end of the precious, coddled, literary work of art. (Though I doubt it. There will always be a café society that enforces the reading of these pastermieces as a way to achieve entrance.) It is almost certainly the end of the “pushed” book.

But Levin seems confused on two things. One is the expectation of payment.

He refers to electronic media as something people expect to be free. This is patently false. Oh, it was true perhaps in the beginning, and what we got was worth every penny. These days, though, I pay for both blogs I like and fansites I like. The subscription is not enforced, but I pay because I want the service to go on.

Even music is not free online, at least not music people want to listen to. Myself and friends pay for subscription services as well as various downloads. Yes, there’s any amount of pirating, but a lot of this is by very young people who couldn’t afford to buy, anyway and who will pay once they’re fans. [(For a clue on this consult Baen about Webscriptions.)

BTW, Baen Books, in SF and fantasy is an exception to almost all of the processes above (though the distribution got interesting for them too, since bookstores refused to stock them for the longest time – you see, they publish both center-right, right and communist authors, so in the twisted parlance of our days they’re a “right wing” publishing house, that bookstores often refused to stock – the reason being too complex to go into here.) This is because Baen Books was a family publishing house (still is) controlled by one person who did not care what the establishment thought of him (now her). Baen maintained (and maintains) an online presence which allowed/allows them to listen to their public directly, so they had a better idea of what sold or didn’t. (There were other innovations which I won’t go into, due to space constraints.) And Baen books, btw, is doing very well.  Better than ever in both print and ebook.]

Most of the writing available for free on line, is worth its price. The exception being the free books on Amazon and the free samples of books on Amazon which are of course really just used as promotional devices.  Oh, and the Baen Free Library which is evil book-pushing.  They hook you with the free ones, and know you’ll pay to keep yourself in books from then on.  (I have a book there.)

And that’s the second thing in which Mark Levin is totally wrong. I now routinely browse Amazon from my Kindle. It’s very easy to download samples (for free) of books that sound even vaguely interesting. I tend to buy about one in three books whose samples I download, and often these aren’t books I’d have THOUGHT of buying, even in a store. Even better, I’m totally uninfluenced by the quality of paper/colors on cover or where the book is shelved. I can assure you I’m buying more books than ever.

Will we see the mega blockbusters, like Rowling or King or… Well… I don’t know. There will continue to be such things as sudden inexplicable fads. Let’s face it, nothing rational can explain those explosions. There will also still be bestsellers, for a definition of bestsellers (though I think they might change in way of manifesting – i.e. right now bestsellers are books that sell a lot of copies in a brief period of time. I think in the future there might be a lot more “sleepers” which sell almost nothing for a year or two and then suddenly achieve critical mass and take off and sell… And continue selling, since there’s no inventory to carry and no printed books to warehouse.) There will still be books that sell a few dozen copies and disappear forever. But I suspect the average model will become the book that sells, oh, somewhere between 5 and 10k copies. In the current model that is a “killing” number. No publisher can publish books that sell only that forever and make a profit. However, for a book selling at say 3.99 ( for ease of my horrible mathematical sense) published by the author (or a small press) this means either 2.75 or 1.32 in profit for the author, which over 5 to 10k books means an author writing two to three books a year (not unusual) is making a passable living. A living that will GROW every year, as more books are added to the list, and the old ones continue selling.

The end of the book? No Mr. Levin. The end of books that are the equivalent of rotting turnips or size 21 boots for the left foot only. The beginning of the golden age of stories people actually want to read.

*Crossposted at Classical Values.*

Over and over again, when talking to writers, they say things like “I write because I have to”. Is that true?

Well, to a great extent it is. Not that I have to write, as such, but that life is so much easier and saner when I’m writing than when I’m not. I sleep at night, for one, and I don’t dream of stories. (It’s actually normal for me to dream of stories, with people I never heard of, yes, particularly if I’ve been in a long, dry writing spell.)

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean writing is easy. Heck, even when I’m DRIVEN on a book, as I seem to be on Darkship Renegades which is entirely in my head save for minor word changes and tweaking, it’s still not easy to write.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is this almost euphoric feeling of writing when I’m completely immersed in the book and the words are flowing and the story is playing itself out – seemingly – all around me. We haven’t yet invented the tech to replicate that feeling with someone else’s stories, and it’s glorious. BUT that feeling requires silence and time and a certain state of mind.

It’s all too easy to snuff out the writing light. Not just with me, but with all my friends, I’ve noted that illness, stress, worry about a family member, worry about an upcoming trip (I’ve mentioned I hate flying, right?), disruptions in the household (say, painting a room or moving stuff around) all of this costs writing time all out of proportion with what time the thing takes, objectively.

A lot of writers start their career when the kids leave the house or when they retire. I think I’d have done that, given the option. As is, looking back over the last ten years, it’s astonishing how much I manage to get written around the edges, even if at times it requires me to go to a hotel for a couple of weeks to finish books.

Yeah, our lawn is dead, our fence needs painting, our house inside needs painting too, and I have to only clean once a week – I feel guilty about all of these. OTOH I know what I’d think if I could meet with one of my favorite dead authors and he told me that he’d written ten fewer books so he could keep a lovely lawn.

This of course is a roundabout way of saying the novel(s) aren’t done. Which means I bought three batteries for my laptop, which I’ll charge before leaving on Friday. I wonder if the people next to me will find Athena very odd…

Sorry this post is late, but I have the sort of headache that just won’t quit. As some of you know – I whine about it enough – I’m prone to headaches anyway and I suspect this is just stress, but I’ve been having a headache and extremely painful throat for several days.

As most of you know, I’m about to fly to Portugal this next Friday. It’s always an emotionally complex endeavor to visit, because well… it’s theoretically my native land, but I’ve been away for twenty five years and twenty five years of more rapid change there than here.

When my husband and I visited Charlotte, NC, which we left 19 years ago, yeah, the neighborhood we left behind was now an old established neighborhood and the little peach tree in the front yard, which I planted the year we moved is now a big, overspreading tree. BUT we could still understand how things worked and by and large we could still find our way around. Portugal has changed so much I can get lost in the village where I was born and raised. New streets and a batch of stack a proll apartments, as it gets swallowed by the growth of the city of Porto (it’s now considered part of Greater Porto) makes it a foreign land. When they say you can’t go back again, they’re deadly serious.

To make things worse, I was never an adult in Portugal. Oh, okay, so I got married at 22, but I had just finished college and still lived with my parents. I simply have no idea how certain things are done… like dealing with a bank, or buying a toothbrush.

This causes a weird mental disconnect as I feel I SHOULD know how to do this stuff, but I don’t.

This year, it’s all complicated by having to go without my husband (money, mostly) which after twenty five years is a very difficult thing to do, particularly since the visit will last two weeks.

Because of all that, I’ve not been able to finish Darkship Renegade. The good news is that I JUST bought extra batteries for the laptop and there will be all this time in the air to work. The bad news is that… I haven’t finished it.

It will be done by the time I return, I promise, and I’ll have news on the subscription: Costs, dates, etc and a mailbox to send checks to for those of you who don’t use paypal.

Meanwhile today I stayed late in bed, reading, trying to de stress. Now I’ll finish the overdue short story. And then maybe I’ll finally get to the novel.

I’m not going to talk about the end of the world, except sideways and stiltedly. Of course I don’t expect the world to end today. I don’t expect the world to end ANY day.

One day the world will end for me, of course. One day the world will end for each of us. But despite all the planet killing events that are possible, I don’t really expect an end to everyone at the same time. Or perhaps it would be more true to say I don’t want to the world to end for everyone at the same time.

Honestly, even in times when I wish otherwise, I’m a woman of very little faith. I hope there is life after death, I don’t see any reason not to believe there isn’t – just like I see no proof there is, though there are a couple of borderline experiences that prove it sufficiently for ME personally, but not enough to prove to anyone else. I have a vague idea of what might be on the other side – if anything – but wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got it completely wrong. Sooner or later I’ll find out. I try to live in a way that if what’s on the other side is an eternity alone with my thoughts, I won’t have too many regrets. (Some are inevitable in the human condition.)

But I believe in life after death – firmly. Need to – in the sense that I believe life will go on after my death. You see, it might be a failing, but I like people. Most people. The vast majority of them who are fairly decent and mind their own business and try to do what they can with what they have. And I’d like to think that millenia from now, when my remains would qualify as an archeological find, there will be families living on Earth, kids laughing, elders complaining, human individuals going after their lawful business.

I do realize that the Earth too will eventually have an end, and I hope we have managed to go to another world, another star by then. I know most species have ends, like individuals do, but I hope if we must end it will be because our descendants have mutated and are better than us, but still us in a way.

It’s weird that I need to believe these things, that I WANT to believe these things, because it was not how I was raised. I grew up believing not only that there would be an end of the world (NOT Christian theology, though disguised that way, because the insertion of “our lady” doesn’t make any sense in those stories. I suspect it was ORIGINALLY “Our Lady” Ballaat, in Phoenician, but I don’t have proof of that either, just the fact that their footprints are all through the area I grew up in. But at any rate, the stories made no reference to the Bible, except to mention the deluge which appears in almost all western legends.) but that the world had already ended several times. “World” understood of course as most of humanity except for a family or two, and world as “civilization.”

My grandmother raised me in the first belief I would live through the next end of the world. She rather pitied me for this, but the wisdom that she’d received from her grandmother indicated it would happen in my generation.

You see, when the Lord created the world THIS time – understood I think as the grand clean up after the last end, though I don’t know I got the impression this was a new planet too. Gee, no wonder I write science fiction and fantasy – He set it in spin and said “Till the year two thousand you shall last, and over two thousand you shall not go.” (Shut up now. I assume omniscience and all, he referred to the year 2000 of the current date. Or at least my grandmother did. I don’t remember giving it much thought, and yes, even at four or so I KNEW the world was more than two thousand years old, because I liked stories of Greece and Rome.) And then Our Lady (See what I mean about it not being a Christian story?) Got a handful of dirt (cosmic dirt?) And threw it over the earth and said “I add these many years.”

Now, maybe she had very dainty hands, because my grandmother didn’t thing it would be more than a couple of decades.

I know this sounds insane to people not raised this way, but I used to spend hours planning what to do and how to survive when the end of the world came – in fire, this time, of course, because Our Lady was distressed by seeing so many drowned babies floating on the waves after the deluge.

I can’t tell you when I stopped assuming the world would have a very definite end for everyone at the same time. The corollary for the other “doesn’t accord to facts” idea I grew up with, that “there have been many civilizations before ours and some more advanced” I’ve never quite managed to shake. Oh, I try. I know it’s not rational. But it’s there all the time at the back of my mind, and I keep trying to figure out the type of story that would “explain” or justify this feeling.

By ten I definitely no longer believed in an “end of the world” – but then we were in the seventies and, oh, my, other people did. End of the world and UFOs and… the silly season in full bloom. (I almost spelled that fool bloom.)

So what is this in the service of? Nothing. Just noting that predictions of the end of the world have always been with us, and some cult or sect is always proclaiming it. Remember the Heaven Gate cult? The world ended for them.

I find it unusual that this time the prophecy is receiving so much air play. Part of it is that I think it’s oddly escapist. “If the world ends, I don’t need to worry about my mortgage being upside down anymore” kind of escapist – just like the inanities of the seventies. (For the record, I’m even willing to endure elephant bells to escape the end of the world, but please refrain.) I think there’s an hysteria to it, an air of “Save us, end of the world, you’re our only hope.” The other part of it is that the stories are fun, in the middle of distressing news about the world and our economy.

It’s of course, entirely possible the world will end today – or any day — but I rather doubt it. A world-wide Earthquake seems a difficult thing to achieve.

But I hope it doesn’t. I hope the world and humanity goes on for a long time after I’m gone – World Without End.

*Crossposted at Classical Values*

*coming this Summer from Naked Reader press, and set in the same world as A Touch of Night*
A Flaw In Her Magic

Sarah A. Hoyt
Based On the Novel Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
I

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntington, with only seven thousand pounds and meager magic to her lot – her being no more than a half blood – astounded her acquaintances by capturing Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in Northampton. The baronet, despite his family’s ancient magic, one of the purest magical lines in the country, was so captivated by Miss Maria’s beauty that no one else would do for him.

All Huntingdon exclaimed at the greatness of the match and predicted that her two sisters – not mean looking themselves – would surely benefit from her elevation. In fact, it was widely expected that Miss Frances and Miss Ward , quite as handsome as their sister, should marry to equal advantage.

Alas, they were wrong. There weren’t enough men of large fortune and clean magic to marry every girl beautiful enough to attract them. At the end of half a dozen years, Miss Ward found herself obliged to accept the proposal of the reverend Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law. Though he had hardly any private fortune, he had received from Sir Thomas the living of Mansfield, which made him the possessor of a thousand a year.

Miss Frances, however, made a runaway marriage. Before her family or either of her sisters had any idea of her intention, she vanished from her room in the dark of night. Despite all searches, no trace of a rope ladder was found and the pursuit that attempted to stop the couple before reaching Gretna Green found themselves, inexplicably, three days behind and the couple married and lodging together at an inn for more than a night.

Thus, Miss Frances became Mrs. Price.

Not only the manner of her marriage, but her refusal to divulge anything about how it had taken place, drove a wedge between herself and her family, which subsisted for eleven years, when the mysteries attaching to the connection were all solved.

Because the connection between the families had been nearly cut, it is perhaps not surprising that these news were brought not by common acquaintances or friendly messengers, but by the London Post, which Sir Bertram had discarded upon the breakfast table, after reading the financial news necessary to manage his financial empire of carpetships, magical manufactories and various other interests around the world.

Mrs. Norris, having come to the great house to inform her sister of what charity was needed in the village – a duty she maintained was hers as the reverend’s wife – picked up the discarded paper and read through it.

Her exclamation, highly improper for a clergyman’s wife, made Lady Bertram look up from her embroidery. “What has happened, my dear?” the good, if indolent, lady roused herself to ask. “Is anything amiss?”

Mrs. Norris, who had gone the color of the paper in her hands, dropped nervelessly onto a dining room chair and commenced fanning herself with the printed leaves.

Though Nurse was sent for the smelling salts, it was some time before Mrs. Norris could speak, and she would only consent to do so when Nurse had left the room and no other servant was visible. “I don’t think we can keep it quiet much longer,” she said, still fanning herself. “For I daresay it is one of those secrets that will out.”

“What secret?” Lady Bertram asked almost fully awake to the possibility something very wrong was toward. “What can you be speaking of, my dear?”

“Well!” Mrs. Norris said. “If it isn’t just like our sister Fanny, always so headstrong as she was, and given to distempered freaks.”

“Fanny? Our sister Fanny?” Lady Bertram asked, now fully alive to impending disaster. “What can our sister Fanny have done that is talked about in the paper?”

“Not Fanny,” Mrs. Norris answered in a thread of voice. “But rather that luckless husband of hers.” She tried to extend the paper in her sister’s direction and failing – because Lady Bertram made no move to receive it – exclaimed. “He has been apprehended for being a were-dragon and forthwith executed in the public square.”

This revelation being of more than anticipated horror made Lady Bertram stare in speechless shock at her sister. At long last she managed no more than ,“But… But the children. I am sure that she has children… And she… herself.”

“She,” Mrs. Norris said, in something that might have been spite. “Escaped persecution because both she and Mr. Price maintained that she knew nothing of the matter. While you know that can’t possibly be true.”

“How can I know that isn’t true?” Lady Bertram asked, in some wonder. Having been a celebrated beauty in her day, the lady had never found much reason to employ her mind.

“The dragon. The flight to Gretna Green,” Mrs. Norris said, snorting. “Flight indeed. No wonder the pursuers were three days behind.”

“Oh,” Lady Bertram said. “Oh, but we shouldn’t–”

“No, of course we shouldn’t denounce our own sister,” Mrs. Norris said. “What can you be thinking of, my dear? Not only would it be excessively cruel, but think of what it would mean for us to be tainted with having an executed aider and abetter of weres in our family. For you know very well that death is dictated for the offense for those who hide weres as well for those who shift form. And if our sister were executed, depend upon it that soon the rumor would go out that she herself was a were. And then… Well, think what people might assume of the blood of your two sons and your lovely daughters, all of whom will have to find spouses and make their way in the world. And poor Mr. Norris, as a clergyman surely can’t afford such a blot upon our name!”

“I wasn’t thinking of denouncing her,” Lady Bertram said, as she absentmindedly petted the little pug dog by her side. “Only what is to become of her children? For I seem to recall not that long ago getting word that she had been brought to bed with her eighth child. Or was it the ninth?”
ab

It wasn’t something they would wish to keep secret from Lord Bertram and, in fact, they immediately applied to him in the belief that his superior understanding and judgement would make it possible for him to discover what was best to be done.

He’d taken refuge in his office, where they found him. After the whole matter had been expounded to him, as he sat on the chair by the fireplace and looked as though he’d been struck by a lightening bolt, Mrs. Norris upheld the opinion that, “Perhaps it would be best to do nothing, for I believe there are legal arrangements in place to look after the children of those discovered as weres, are there not?”

Lord Bertram nodded. “Well, they are supposed to be taken to special houses. Were-orphans they’re called,” he said. “They are taken to special houses, where they are raised in the most strict virtue and discipline, in the hopes that by upbringing any flaw in their blood might be mitigated. They are not, of course, allowed to stay with their parent, even should the parent, as your sister did, survive, because they are believed best removed from such evil influences.”

“There, you see, my dear Maria,” Mrs. Norris said. “The children will be well taken care of, and thus we will not be involved in the whole sorry affair.”

But Lord Bertram was stroking his red beard, absently, a gesture he employed when deep in thought. “Mind you,” he said. “I’ve always heard of those houses as being terrible places and the lot of the children placed there far worse than the lot of children thrown on the parish or sent to work houses. One hears … rumors… of beatings and cold water baths and… and of other abuses,” he said coloring a little. “I would not wish any of my nephews of nieces to be subjected to such. And there’s no doubt the court would allow them to live with us, given our probity and respectability as well as the ancient and pure nature of my magic.”

“Well,” Mrs. Norris said. “I’m sure such rumors are unfounded and that–”

“On the other hand the upbringing of orphans – even those whose blood is not tainted – is an expensive affair, and what with the Chinese pirates attacking two of my carpetships only last week, my affairs aren’t going as famously as I’d like them to. It would be best, perhaps, to find them a good and honest farm wife, who would take them all in and raise them. I can then apply to the home for their release. I believe farm wives are willing to raise children for a quite modest sum.”

The endeavor proved more complicated than at first anticipated. The children, it appeared, had not only been taken over by the vast apparatus that his majesty’s government employed to suppress dangerous weres – they had been dispersed throughout the country to various institutions designated for the upbringing of were- orphans. And the majority of them appeared to have vanished as thoroughly as though they’d been turned invisible.

Lord Bertram, worried, had contracted with a man to investigate their probable whereabouts, and had followed a presumption that perhaps their name had been misspelled. However, two orphans under the name of Brice bore no resemblance to any of the missing children; three young men by the name of Prince were far too old to be Mrs. Price’s brood. In the end, only two were found – the eldest, William, aged 12 and Fanny, aged 10. They had been sent to a home in Wales under the surname Prize, but they were old enough to know their own name and how to write it, and so were discovered.

Removing them from the home involved another bit of work, starting with determining whether they wanted to remove them at all.

“Well,” Mrs. Norris said, doubtfully, as she and her sister Bertram and Lord Bertram gathered in the sitting room after the children had gone to bed. “At those ages, perhaps they could be of some use around the house. But I do not see that there’s any great urgency in removing them from the home, is there? I mean, they are not helpless babes who might–”

“I believe,” Lord Bertram interrupted. “That the investigator who saw both the children considers our niece, Fanny, to be prettyish.”

“Well… well… so much the better,” Mrs. Norris said. “Doubtless, given a strict education, she will emerge with enough poise and grace to attract a good marriage. Well, not what would be considered a good marriage for your daughters, Lord Bertram, of course. With no dowry and tainted magic in her blood, the poor mite can’t be expected to marry into any of the good orders of society. Why, I doubt even half-bloods with only a little bit of magic would consent to ally themselves with her. But it is quite possible that a farmer–”

“Mrs. Norris, you are a clergyman’s wife,” Lord Bertram said, sternly. “As such, I don’t doubt that you know what terrible things men can do to prettyish young ladies with no protection, particularly in such a setting as a home that employs… less than the most elevated elements of society.”

Mrs. Norris seemed so unsettled by this that she couldn’t find words.

“No,” Sir Bertram said. “We will have to get her out. At least her. Though the investigator also tells me that William is clever and good at his maths and mad to go on the carpetships.” He sighed. “That is easy enough to manage, since I can arrange for him to start as a cabin boy on one of my Caribbean line carpetships. But Fanny…” He shook his head. “If we take her under our protection, something will have to be done for her. I can’t raise her here and expect her to have nothing upon her marriage. Perhaps if you and Mr. Norris could contribute something and Lady Bertram and I–”

“But she would have something,” Mrs. Norris said. She snorted. “Why any girl given the privilege of consorting with your daughters, and acquiring such conduct and being brought into fashion, cannot fail to make a good marriage. She should consider herself fortunate.”

Lord Bertram looked doubtful, and yet undertook the long process of bringing the children out of the home.
ab

When Fanny Price was collected from the were-orphans home, she was given no idea where she would be going, nor who was to be in charge of her.

Just as suddenly as she’d been removed from her home to the were-orphans home, given no time to collect her things or even to make sure that her siblings stayed together, given an ugly grey uniform and dark, flat shoes, so now she was removed from the dormitory and brought up front, where she was relieved to find William was also upfront, ready to be picked up by a kind man with a pony trap, which delivered them to the post house, which in due time allowed them to board the express and delivered them to the grand gates of Mansfield park.

She was less sanguine about finding that her brother William would be leaving the very next morning to join the crew of Lord Bertram’s carpetship, The Favorable Winds.

Though William had always wanted to go aboard one of the grand palaces built atop flying carpets and visit the four corners of the world, though he’d long dreamed of eventually becoming Air Captain Price, the supreme authority aboard one of those, Fanny had hoped to have his company yet a while longer.

His leaving meant she stayed behind marooned with a lot of strangers. Less than a year ago, she’d been the eldest daughter of a hopeful family– not wealthy but certainly not starving, and cheerful with it. Now she was bereft of mother and siblings and as to poor papa she’d been warned never to mention him nor the manner of his demise to anyone.

Everyone in the household intimidated her, from her kind but stern uncle Bertram, to her indolent aunt to their two boys who were so grown as to appear as adults to her. Even the girls, who were closer to her age, scared her.

A day in the schoolroom with their governess was enough to allow Fanny to understand she’d not been taught any of the genteel magical arts that her cousins were conversant with.

“Mama, Fanny is so stupid,” Julia said. “She can’t even light a mage light.”

“Yes, Mama,” Maria said. “She’s like a half blood. She can’t even make a show of lights, or a display of colors.”

But the most alarming report came from the governess herself to Sir Bertram, one evening after dinner. “I am afraid, sir, that she’s not so much stupid as unable.”

The gentleman looked up in confusion. “Well, I know the magic in my wife’s side is not very strong. They’ve married in trade a few times and diluted its potency. But yet, she’s not a commoner. She ought to be able to do something. I mean, at the very least the pretty light shows and things that any well-bred young damsel ought to command.”

The governess had looked worried. “Yes, I know she should, sir, but I’m very much afraid that she can’t. It’s as though there is…” She looked down at her feet, as if afraid to face him with the bad news. “A flaw in her magic.”

“A flaw in her magic?” Lord Bertram asked. “Surely you’re not implying she is… a were? Ridiculous. Surely it would have manifested by now?” But in his heart of hearts, Lord Bertram wondered what he’d brought into his home and family.