I think all of us came into the business with a mental image of that great camaraderie between writers, particularly writers of sf/f, which seemed perfectly natural.

After all, each of us grew up feeling profoundly weird, just on the writing thing (the only reason I didn’t get pounded for going “oooooh” in an ecstatic way when a story or essay was assigned is that I was twice as large as the other kids in the school – Portugal in the sixties and seventies wasn’t known for tall people – and because, frankly, I was the one people were scared of. [Never without provocation but though this might not be obvious from this blog, I have a TEENY temper.]) but also on the science fiction thing.

So I always figured out that though I was like a squid-headed (Take THAT Margaret Atwood) alien among humans, if I could go into a group of my own kind – which to me always implied being published in the traditional way and having credibility and all – I’d be received like the prodigal daughter and welcomed…

Only, it didn’t work out that way.  To some extent, I think it did in the days of pulps – note, I said to some extent – and after that too, at least in groups.  Yes, SF/F is known for the kind of epic feuds where people don’t speak to other people for years “because of what he said at the WF banquet in 1976!” but that in itself is almost heart warming.  All big families have these riffs, and come on, it’s not any different than having a big feud over “what they said about our Maudie.”

But by the time I entered – and, again, I was gratified by noting that Kris Rusch has identified the time I came in as well into the “crazy years” of publishing.  I mean, the poison of misapplied statistics “numbers” started almost ten years before I broke in – it had devolved into something bizarre.

It was – I’ve been reading a lot about the Soviet Satellites during Soviet rule (Well, there is a reason, relating to the next novel I post here in installments – at least if the gamble on this one pays off in both contributions and advance word of mouth for the piece, the second being more important than the first) – a lot like the terror regimens that always seem to follow the French/Soviet style of revolution.

It makes sense in a way, because it’s what happens when things start going disastrously wrong on a society with utopian aims, (and most people involved in publishing are academic-utopians of a form or another) and it crashes head first into human nature in an undeniable way.  Then the idea that human nature must be suppressed, worked upon and elevated becomes the value, since you’re not going to achieve nirvana anyway.

And publishing was running bad when I came in, in the same way early utopian revolutions run bad.  Yeah, you have your great slogans, but the money is running dry.  So, of course, the people at the top decided that what they should do was pick winners and losers, since, meh, the numbers the way they were being used were rife for manipulation.

This is much like a tyrannical regimen picking winners and losers, particularly when you consider that most of those picks were “for agreeing with the editor” though editor-politics are often odd, as they’re often single-issuers.  (Unfortunately for most of those editors the single issue is misandry, in which I cannot concur.  In fact I can’t even pretend and still look at myself in mirror every morning.)

Of course, editors and publishers couldn’t have you killed and all your wealth confiscated, but they could block you from publishing, which for a lot of writers is worse than death, and make sure no one saw your books, ever.

And while some of the books that made it to the top were good, no one who saw how the sausage factory worked on the other side, can have the slightest belief that these workings are in fact even vaguely “fair” or that traditional publishing is in any way a meritocracy.

In fact it was more like a “Meritrocracy” in which we meretriciously tried to ingratiate ourselves with the powers at the top, who could make or break our career even while resenting their power and often insane decisions.  Because we couldn’t do anything about them, we often turned on each other, both as a way of competition and because we had to take it out on SOMEONE.

The field has always run on gossip, but now it was gossip on steroids.  I know there are several people in the field who plain won’t talk to me, and I have to assume it’s because someone told them I said or did something about their Maudie, and I have no CLUE what.  (In the same way that some people, as I came into the field went out of their way to attack me, even though I was in no way in their way and could in no way affect them.)  This kind of crazy-making and paranoia leads to spying, friend telling on friend and the opposite of fellowship and camaraderie.  You were jokeying for position in the field, always afraid that having friends in the band that editors didn’t like would make you one of the d*med.  Yes, people dropped friends because the friends were not in good odor with publishers.  Yes, people had massive fights because they SUSPECTED (on the flimsiest evidence) other writers of messing up their relationship with a publisher.  And that was among beginners and midlisters.  I have enough bestselling friends to know that at their level, behind a facade of comity, it could get WAY worse.  And yes, we all engaged to some extent in double think.

Look, I used to think that was my experience.  That I was the only one who felt cut-off, paranoid (always a tendency for me) and engaging in double think so I didn’t throttle the living day light out of people whose power over and indifference to my career drove me batty.

Turns out, as the gates are inching open, no.  Not so much so.

And though it’s very early days yet, as the possibility of having a career without jumping through crazy-making hoops, is starting to dawn, I’m starting to see relations between writers change.  Instead of the insane competition and trying to avoid being near those who are slated for career-death, we’re starting to cooperate in small ways and go “Hey, you know, if you use this editor, he’s cheap and good” or “hey, this program works better for the conversions” or even “Would you give me a blurb for my indie book?”  And we’re starting to relax a little around each other and admit that yeah, our real anger is at the publishers – all of us, even the ones who are doing well, know someone who was screwed over for no rational reason – not at each other.

Of course, up from that – and a while from that, I suspect – there will be a time when the publishers too see that there is a gate out of the way the system has entrapped them, because they too had to do things in a way they’d rather not, because of distributors, mega chain bookstores, etc.

What’s really heart warming and startling is seeing writers of different political stripes collaborate in trying to figure out the new model.  I’d always assumed crazy politics were a part of my field, but maybe it’s more that because the publishers and editors cared we had to, also.  Heaven knows in other professions people are friends across political lines.  But we were in mode “must not be seen with x or will be sent to publishing gulag.”

I’m not saying that traditional publishers will ever completely reform (or that all writers will become buddy-buddy).  But I think it will become more of a meritocracy in competing with a more open system.  And that’s enough (most of us can at least stop the gladiatorial combat.)  Oh, okay, when dictatorial regimes fall anarchy follows for a while, but afterwards there is at least the chance of “Something better hereafter.”

And we’re living right at the cusp of it.  We few, we happy few, we band of writers…

I don’t know why people are so surprised I write Austen fan fic.  And there are ALWAYS surprised people in the audience when I say that.  It can’t be they’re surprised that I decided to rape Austen.  After raping Shakespeare and Dumas, surely they don’t think Austen would be safe from me?  (Perhaps they think I would have respect for her maidenly status?  Who knows?)  So it must be shock there is such a thing as Jane Austen fan fiction.  Mind you, there shouldn’t be.  Most of it is based on the A & E mini series.  With me, well, books were to me what movies are to the readers today, so, bah, of course I rape it.  You should count yourself lucky I don’t do slash Austen fanfic.  (Actually I wrote one slash story, once, not in Austen, and in one fandom I won’t admit to.  It was done to see if I could.  I could.  You will never know where.  Mwah ah ah ah ah ah.  Which is good, as I could write it but I couldn’t read it.  It’s ick.)

Anyway, today I woke up feeling like living-dead crud.  For one, I normally have trouble staying in bed past six am, and today I slept till nine thirty.  For another, I feel like what I should do is go back to bed and sleep the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I have too much to do, both house and writing.  This is what being the mommy is.  One girds one loins (as opposing to girddling them, which is what I used to say as a newcomer to the US) and one goes on.  That’s life.  But that means I DO NOT post the how-to-write subplots thread I wanted to do (figured out what bothered me about Gabriel’s mother, btw.  Hint, there’s a reason he looks so much like Seraphim. :)  No, no, not telling till chapt… nine or ten, when that scene hits.  And NO she’s not the dowager duchess.  Or her sister.)  If I did, it would come out all muddled.  Instead, I’m going to expose you to my Austen Lunacy in its full glory.  This is the story currently unfinished (maybe by posting here, I’ll get myself to finish, if I do one chater at a time,) over at the dwiggies site and what my austen fan-fans call Elf Prince Darcy.  Those of you who are literature purists may leave the room now.  You have my blessing.  The rubber neckers who want to watch the rape, look on:

Between The Night 

And The Morrow

“They’re trooping at Netherfield again,” Mrs. Bennet told her esteemed spouse over breakfast one fine Spring morning.

Mr. Bennet, engrossed in the perusal of the – only one day late – London news looked over the corner of his paper, an amused expression on his face. “Who are they my dear?” he asked. “I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.”

“Why, the Good Neighbors . Everyone knows that they used to haunt the mound in Netherfield Park.”

The paper rustled. “You must indulge my ignorance, but who is everyone? And who are these Good Neighbors? I would say all our neighbors are good.”

For just a moment, Mrs. Bennet was speechless, an occasion rare enough that it caused the rest of the table to fall silent and the titter of her youngest daughter, Lydia, seated at the other end, to echo unnaturally loud. Jane, the oldest daughter, and Elizabeth, the second oldest, directed looks of reproach at their sister, and Lydia clasped her hands over her mouth to keep herself silent. The next youngest, Kitty, hid her own laughter behind a cough. And Mary, the middle daughter, looked at them over her glasses, with the puzzled expression of a person awakened from a dream – or in this case from the book, hid on her lap, half-under the table.

“The… Good Neighbors!” Mrs. Bennet finally exploded. “You know. The Fair Folk.”

Before Mr. Bennet could open his mouth to tease his spouse further, Mary interjected, “We are to understand that the local people – prey to the most vile superstition – believe that there are creatures who inhabit old mounds. They call them the Good Neighbors or the Fair Folk to avoid calling them fairies or elves. All nonsense of course. Fordyce’s makes it very clear that no such creatures exist, nor…”

“Thank you Mary,” Mr. Bennet said, in repressive accents. “You have enlightened us all.” Then turning to his wife. “From hence do you have this… fairy tale, Mrs. Bennet?”

“Why my sister Phillips says she saw them with her own eyes, riding their prancing steeds over the dark fields at midnight. All arrayed in cloth like spider-webs, and wearing bells.”

“It seems to me they’d catch their death of chill, if they’re riding in spider-webs in the moonlight. And besides, what was your sister Phillips doing up at that time?”

“Well… I daresay she could not sleep. She has nerves, you know, though I’m sure she doesn’t suffer like I do.”

“No one suffers like you do, my dear, but all the same… How do you know your sister Phillips didn’t dream the whole? And if she didn’t, what should it matter to us if the elves come back to their mound? You said they’ve been there before.”

“But not for a good fifty years Mr. Bennet. As for what it matters, I think it should be obvious. It is very likely, you know, that they’ll kidnap one of our daughters.”

“Is that their purpose, then? In coming to this region? To kidnap one of our daughters?”

“Their purpose! Don’t be ridiculous. But they are likely to see one of them and enchant her, and then how are we to recover her? We shall be ruined. And turned out to starve in the hedgerows.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Bennet said, looking over his paper. “With five daughters to marry and my estate entailed away from the female line, we can’t be choosy, can we? Anything that comes in shape of a son-in-law must be accepted.” He grinned at his daughters, over the paper, “What say you, Lizzy, would you like to marry an elf?”

“Indeed, no, Papa,” his second-oldest daughter, who had a lively sense of humor said, with every semblance of propriety. “Too grand by far for me. And I prefer to take my walks in the daytime.”

“I see,” Mr. Bennet said. “This is what I suggest, Mrs. Bennet. We should send all our daughters – and perhaps you, yourself since you’re as handsome as any of them – walking around the mound in the dark of night. I’ll send a note with you saying the elf can take whichever he pleases and then–”

“Oh, Mr. Bennet,” his spouse interrupted. “I pray you will not tease me so. It is very ill to joke about these subjects. Indeed it is.”

“Mama is right, Papa,” Mary said.

“But why, if you just said it is all superstition?” He rose from the table. “Recommend our sister Phillips not to eat lobster patties before bed, my dear,” he told his spouse. “And you’ll see that the elves vanish altogether.”

“Do you think there are such things as elves, Lizzy?” Jane asked in the bedroom they shared that evening. She was the oldest in the family, a blond beauty with perfectly regular features set in an oval face. In her white linen nightgown, her knees drawn up and her arms around her knees, she looked like an angel.

Her slightly darker sister, Lizzy, whose face was more impish than beautiful, turned back from where she’d been hanging her clothes. “Ah, Jane. You know better than to believe fairytales. You are almost two and twenty, after all.”

“But… Wouldn’t it be lovely…” She trailed off.

“Wouldn’t what be lovely?” Lizzy asked, gently. Jane was a kind soul, determined to go through the world thinking the best of everyone who crossed her path. To casual observers, she might appear superficial or not very smart, but her sister knew that there was a dreaming, romantic nature beneath the smiling face.

“Oh… just to think that there is a world where dowries and connections do not matter – where… where it’s all moonlight and shadows and…”

“I’m sure,” Lizzy said. “That if there were such a world, the dowries and wealth would matter too. It might be fairy gold, but no doubt, we’d need to amass a quantity of it before we could marry an elf of birth and substance. And then,” she said. “Imagine how their nobility and gentry would look down on us. You want to marry a mortal? How shocking.”

“Stop it, Lizzy,” Jane said, giggling. “Do you never take anything seriously?”

“Very little,” Lizzy confessed, rounding on her sister with a smiling face. “Being one of five daughters, with no dowry and no connections, I can choose to go through life crying or laughing. And I dearly love to laugh.” As she spoke, she was opening their window to let in some of the still cool but refreshing spring air.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful, though,” Jane said. “If we were to meet someone who loved us for ourselves?”

“Very wonderful,” Lizzy said. “As in a rare wonder which I don’t expect to see– Oh!”

The oh was rung from her, seemingly all unwilling, erupting with force from her lips.

“What is it?” her sister asked, rising to look over Lizzy’s shoulder.

“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing,” Lizzy said recovering. “Just some lights in the little wilderness next to the park, which–” She stopped.

She stopped because under the moonlight, the lights that had been coiling through the little wilderness next to their house – a train of lights, really, a very odd phenomenon – resolved itself into … a group of riders in the moonlight.

There were two ladies and three gentlemen, riding in the silvery glow of the full moon. At the front, mounted on chestnut steeds of a grace and elegance such as Elizabeth had never seen, were two men – one dark and one blond. The dark one looked slightly taller than the other, and rode slightly ahead. As he turned his face to say something to his companion, the moonlight hit his face in full – displaying a straight nose, a square chin, full lips. Something to his expression attracted Lizzy, and she leaned forward, from her window, captivated.

But he never looked at her. He wore antiquated clothing, of the sort that men wore in portraits from a few hundred years ago. Short breeches displayed a length of stocking-encased leg, ending in ankle boots. A doublet outlined broad shoulders and a waist that could not be as small as it looked. On his head was a green cap, with a green feather. His hair, tied back, flowed behind him as he rode. “Oh,” Lizzy said, wondering if she was seeing a ghost. For who else would ride in that strange a costume through the neighborhood at night?

But if she was seeing a ghost, then so was Jane, whose hand clenched on her arm, as the riders below pointed in the direction of Netherfield, turned that way and… vanished into the night.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Dreaming. I must be dreaming.”

“Oh no,” Jane said. “We saw them. They were… I’m sure they’re elves.”

“More likely London gentlemen and ladies playing a prank,” Lizzy said.

Jane hesitated, but at last said, “I daresay you’re right. People have such lively senses of humor.”

But later, when they were both in bed, Jane spoke, in the dark, “Lizzy? Did you see the… the blond gentleman? I daresay it was the most pleasant face I’ve ever beheld.”

(For those of you who came looking for the weekly installment of Witchfinder, I posted it yesterday.  You see, I thought it was Friday yesterday.  Stupid time machine is on the blink again.  Page down or click here for chapters five and six — a double posting.)

As a lot of you know, I don’t read my Amazon reviews.  Why don’t I read my Amazon reviews?  Don’t I want to know what readers think?

Yes, I do want to know what readers think.  No, it’s not that I think I’m so wonderful that I can’t take criticism.  I do take criticism from chosen beta readers, in controlled circumstances.  From the public at large and without my knowing their background?  The problem is that I have this unerring ability to take 100 good reviews in stride and then believe the one awful review I get.  It’s a gift.  I have the same issue with comments on snippets, which I suspect sometimes causes me to come across as defensive or cranky.  Because I have a way of obsessing on the stuff someone hated/didn’t get and then proceed to turn the entire book into hamburger by trying to avoid whatever they saw.  Which nine times out of ten no one else saw.

To level with you, the successful author with 20 novels traditionally published and a few more under contract, not counting the indies and experiments, is someone who shows up at cons and occasionally at readings or signings.  The rest of the time I feel much like I did when I first moved into the area where I now live: almost thirty, read a lot, wrote a lot, couldn’t give my stuff away for love or money.  When I’m walking along the streets where I pushed a baby carriage around here twenty years ago, I feel like exactly the same person, and still don’t know if I’ll ever be “good enough” to be a writer.

Negative reviews go into that huge crater of lack of confidence and do nasty things that often end with me blocked for three or four months.

So, I don’t read Amazon reviews.  I pretend they don’t exist.  I can’t afford the silence.

Which is why I was probably the last to know there were comments on A Touch Of Night complaining of homophobia.  I heard about it when several people bragged of defending me (thank you guys, you’re all nuts but I love you.) I’ll confess I haven’t read the comments yet, and don’t intend to, so what I have is at a remove.

However, the “homophobic” comment bothered me.  It bothered me a) because it’s the sort of mud that sticks.  b) because it’s so far from the truth it’s almost insane.  c) because I don’t remember what language I used in that book, and when I’m being period-accurate it can get bad.

The background on the piece – it’s Pride and Prejudice set in the world of the Magical British Empire.  This means it’s Regency England with dragons and other shape shifters and some magic.  Shape shifters are illegal and will get executed on sight if found out.

We wrote it, my friend Sofie Skapski and I, because we wanted to write something together for the Derbyshire Writers Guild website and because at the time we started it looked like my MBE would never sell.  (It took eight years from first proposal to placing it.)  Because we were both very busy writing/posting on it was irregular and it took us years to finish.  Then, years after we finished, I kept running into reviews of it, talking about how they wished someone would edit and bring it out properly.  So, we did, with Naked Reader Press, and it’s selling very well for us (or it was, until we took it free, which it might still be.)  (Yeah, the cover is appalling.  I designed a new one for it yesterday.)

As a minor plot point one of the characters – trying not to do spoilers – a delicately brought up young girl, finds two male characters naked in the rhubarb patch, and thinks they were engaging in a bit of snogging.  She is horribly shocked and thinks it revolting, etc.  (To be honest, she probably would have thought the same were it hetero snogging in the rubharb.  It was the spirit of the time.)  It never occurs to her that they were shifters and had just shifted back to human.

Now, part of this was that I was in the spirit of the times and I wanted to show how scary/shocking/revolting she found the snogging, because I wanted to emphasize that with all that, she still thought it was better and easier to accept than shifting.  Even though she, herself, feels sympathetic to shifters, she has acquired prejudice through her upbringing, which make that idea unthinkable to her.  Beyond the pale.

When I’m in that sort of “building the world through language” mode, I can forget that I’m writing for modern readers.  I understand one of the reviewers objected SPECIFICALLY to homophobic language though because I haven’t read the comments, I don’t know if this means that there’s anything stronger than “unnatural.”

Sigh.

So, is this where I defend myself?  Bah.  No.  It is however where I give some context.

For better or worse, I am not homophobic.  Yes, my religion has opinions on it.  My religion also has opinions on judging others, a prerogative not reserved for mere humans.  I do have any number of gay friends of both genders and, what’s more important because more personal and closer to ME, I have any number of gay characters.

Not on purpose in either case. I pick my friends for their minds, and who they sleep with is a matter of profound and complete indifference, except in the sense of figuring out whom we need to invite for dinner or in the sense of worrying about those of them of any orientation  (you know who you are) who pick boyfriends/girlfriends like saner people play Russian roulette.

The character thing is a little more complex.  Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that characters are the part of my writing I get for “free.”  I.e. I don’t work on them consciously, and they only work if I leave them alone.  I have colleagues who base characters on people they know.  I have others who build them from blocks, or audition them for parts.  I can’t do that.  The characters are as though they were hired by another department (Subconscious inc. the subcontractor.)  A cranky contractor who will only give me a choice, and if I tamper with it, that’s it, I have to cancel that job.  If I go with it, I end up finding that the characteristics that drove me nuts were the ones I need for the story.

Unfortunately SI has a very aggressive affirmative action policy for gay characters.  I get them all out of proportion with population.  And before you think that “unfortunately” means I have something against gay characters (rolls eyes) no.  I’m just always afraid that they’re not marketable.  This doesn’t seem to be true, btw.  At least even very conservative people don’t seem to be put off by my gay characters.  The fear everyone will hate books with gay characters seems to be an obsession of traditional publishing.  As I said  publishers get in my mind.  It’s a problem.  Not all the bleach in the world can clean up afterwards.

And I hope that traditional publishing is wrong on that, because I find myself in the middle of a novel with a gay main character.  (No, not Witchfinder.  Seraphim is straight, his indifference to Honoria notwithstanding.)  I believe they are indeed wrong.  So far no one has complained about the fact that Ben is the only grown up in the Elise Hyatt books.  Or that Nat, for all his faults, is a true hero in Darkship Thieves.  And I found Billy Blacklock rather endearing in Soul Of Fire, and no one, not even my most conservative readers, have complained about him.  Even though that’s as close as it comes to my having written snogging on screen/page.

The thing is, I don’t write my gay characters as walking agendas.  They come to me and I write them as people.  Some of them are unbearable (Ben’s boyfriend in Dipped, Stripped and Dead) and a lot of them are very decent people.  A few are even heroes, often despite themselves.

And I write the other characters as people too.  Which means they often have the prejudices of their time and place.  More so when I need it to emphasize world building.

Am I suddenly afraid that my gay friends will read the book and find it offensive?  Oh, heck, yes, particularly since I know one of my straight friends sent one of them a copy (Yes, we’re very bad in my group of friends.  No proper apartheid observed by orientation and color and all.)  On hearing it had been sent my first reaction was to be afraid the language (which I don’t remember, so in my head it’s very bad indeed) that the character uses to think of homosexuality will hurt my friend.  Oh, this is not rational on my part.  He’s an intelligent man with a good grasp of history and he’s more likely to be offended by my raping of Austen than by some stray slurs.  On the other hand I know that after a while one can get over sensitized (hey, kids, I went through middle school as a ‘brainy’ girl whose eczema – back then mostly on my face – often made her look hideous.  I know from slurs.  And from oversensitization) and it hurts even when we know it’s not supposed to, particularly when it comes from someone we know is a friend.

I don’t like hurting my friends.  I don’t like hurting people I don’t know, much less people I know and like and much, much less the people I like enough to let into my (largely unprotected) inner circle, where they get to know the insecure newby inside, and not just the multipublished author who shows up at cons.

So, if I were writing it now and had thought of this, would I change what I wrote?  I don’t know.  If I’d known that people would flinch from it, I might have softened the language or put in a contrary thought about how they can’t help it or something.  (Though she obviously thinks they can’t help it from the conversation she misinterprets.  Very forward for her time.)  I will note that though she’s shocked and reacts weirdly, she doesn’t denounce them to the authorities.  I will also note later on she’s very concerned for the feelings of one of them should his supposed lover marry.  As an added explanation, she got her information on homosexuality from stories about the decadence of Rome, which is plausible for the time, and also would be not the best light.

But it never occurred to me that people would take the words/thoughts out of context and be hurt by them.  And I didn’t think of the oversensitization aspect.  If anything, over at the fan group, I got dinged because a) she shouldn’t know what homosexuality was (yeah, raised in the country and all) and b) she wasn’t shocked ENOUGH. (I figured if her father let her read about Greece and Rome she was a tad more broadminded than your normal Regency miss.)

But though I might have “softened” or soft lighted her reaction – and I might have.  Again, I hate hurting people without need or purpose – there is only so much one can do.  She WAS a Regency Miss.  One can’t backward-rewrite history and in fact, in my dipping a toe into reading romance, I’ve found that nothing gets the book thrown across the room so fast as regency characters with shockingly modern attitudes – about women, about orientation, about the poor, etc.  Now, there were more tolerant opinions, for the time, but for the record, even the do-gooders who lived to improve the lot of the children of the poor didn’t train the little ones to be lawyers or doctors, and made sure they worked for their keep, just as they would in a working class house.  To have the character bridle at the idea of having children work makes book take flying lessons.  And the same, I suppose, if a REGENCY character thought “Hey, gay people should be allowed to marry.”  Or the like.

I honestly don’t remember how strong the language I used was.  I presume it wasn’t terrible because neither the fans who answered on the unedited novel, nor the editors called me on it.  (Of course, it’s entirely possible they were immersed in the time period.)  And I doubt I’d soften it much if I went back now.  I certainly can’t/won’t soften the historical attitudes.  It’s important we know how fraught things were back then, because otherwise we start imagining it’s all bunnies and butterflies and everyone always agrees on everything.

On the other hand, might I have softened it by having the character have a wee flash of understanding?  Probably.

But here’s the thing – you never know how people will react to your book.  Some of the controversial things you put in, people never notice.  And then they’ll get offended because your young girl character wore blue and “Studies show that girls don’t like blue.”

What do I do about the “homophobic” charge?  Nothing.  I take a deep breath and trust in my collection of work and, more importantly, in how I live to defend me or not.  I apologize to my friends, if I make them flinch.  Because I LIKE them and don’t like hurting them.  But to the public, at large?  I will not let them in my head any more than I intend to let editors in, ever again.

If I wrote books guaranteed not to offend anyone ever, they wouldn’t even have words.  Or any pictures, either.  Or color.

I write the best I can.  You take me as I am, or you don’t take me at all.  But you don’t get to dictate my thought process or my opinions.  If it ever comes to that, I’ll go and dig ditches for a living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck.

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

The Monster

Carry Me To the Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

POPcorn Kittehs!

And this time it’s serious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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