My one big quote

The scholar John William Burgon is remembered for the last line of his prize poem Petra, describing that inaccessible city: "Rose-red city, half as old as time".  It seems he otherwise had a busy and productive scholarly career, but no one is interested in that.

One line?  At the moment, anyway, my internet fame comes from one line as well:  "The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards".  It comes from my first book, Carve the Sky.  How it escaped into the wild is unknown, but it certainly has proliferated, most recently in the form of sweatshirts and hoodies.

There are certainly other usable lines in my work.  One a friend always uses is from my Future Boston story, "Focal Plane":  "An efficient technology is like the flu:  sooner or later you end up with it."

Or, boiled down from something Norbert Spillvagen says at the NEO Diner in Brain Thief: "Accept the cowgirl".  Now that I'd like to see on a T-shirt.

And I thought Amazon was my only hope

I checked the Brain Thief page on Amazon today, to see if there were any more reviews, and discovered that Amazon is no longer selling the book.  I have to admit, I sat there stunned for a bit, wondering if the shelf life of books had now gone below a month.  I looked around, and saw that other books, even quite popular ones, were not being sold by Amazon either.  What was the issue?

I found the answer, or at least the beginnings of one, on Tobias Buckell's site (Mr. Buckell is a better site for What's Going On Now, BTW--I'm much better on What Was Going On Then).  He links to a NY Times story that says that Amazon has pulled all books from Macmillan (which includes Tor Books), in an apparent dispute over Kindle pricing.

My book isn't even available on Kindle! Though I hope it will be at some point.  So my poor little book, already struggling to get sold, is now crushed like a butterfly under the gargantuan feet of two struggling saurians.

I hope this gets resolved quickly.  Given the state of the publishing market, this is not what any of us needs.  Meanwhile, if you are buying online, you can get Brain Thief at Barnes & Noble.

My Boskone schedule

I will be at Boskone Feb 12-14.  The usual mix of panels on topics I know nothing about!  But I think I can sign my name, so the autographic session should go just fine.

Friday  6pm        Boston as Setting

        Alexander Jablokov        (M)

        Toni L. P. Kelner    

        Paul G. Tremblay    

    The subway line to Cambridge inspired H.P. Lovecraft to visions of

    subterranean Antarctic horror; Hal Clement drowned Beantown under

    dozens of feet of water. Why Boston? Who's writing about here

    lately? What scenic SFnal possibilities does our fair city present?

    How can you convey its charm to readers who have never felt Boston's

    balmy February breeze?

 Friday  8:30pm     Reading (0.5 hrs)

        Alexander Jablokov    

 Saturday1pm        The Market(s) for Short Fiction

        Neil Clarke        (M)

        Elaine Isaak    

        Alexander Jablokov    

        James Patrick Kelly    

    Magazines, anthologies, the web? Find out where the short stuff

    sells, and how to get a piece of the action.

  Saturday2pm        The City and Science Fiction

        S. C. Butler    

        Alexander Jablokov        (M)

        James Patrick Kelly    

        Patrick Nielsen Hayden    

        Steven H. Silver    

    From the planet-spanning urbs of Trantor or Coruscant to the

    steamfunkier precincts of New Crobuzon to the vastly vertical

    Spearpoint of Alastair Reynolds  forthcoming Terminal World   what s

    your favorite skiffy megalopolis? Would you move there tomorrow?

    Would it actually work as a technological/societal/economic

    artifact? In an advanced, post-scarcity society, would people even

    want to pig-pile together? What will cities be like in the future?

    (And what would you prefer them to be?)

 Saturday4pm        Autographing

 Sunday  1pm        Long Series: What Gives Them Staying Powers?

        Jeffrey A. Carver

        John R. Douglas        (M)

        Alexander Jablokov    

        Rosemary Kirstein    

        Alastair Reynolds    

    Is it just the comfort of returning to a familiar place....or

    something more? Expound.

Mysteries and science fiction

Brain Thief is marketed as a science fiction novel, but it's also a mystery novel.  Some readers have even said it should be called a mystery with science fiction elements, because the mystery element is key to its appeal.  I would agree, though I think the gonzo part is important too:  the thirty-foot fiberglass cowgirl riding a rocket really catches the spirit of the book.

It's hard to categorize.  That's not such a great idea from a marketing perspective (you'd think I know better), but there are a group of readers for whom this is perfect.  I don't want to mislead anyone, so I'm working hard to find and inform this group of people:  people who like well-constructed mysteries, and find an SF element a plus, and like humor and sly observation.

If you are one of them, drop me a note and help me!  How do I get this book in the hands of people like you?

Thinking with a pen

You might think that thinking takes place entirely in your head.  You imagine a contemplative sitting on a rock in the mountains somewhere, thinking great thoughts.  There probably are people who can put complex ideas together that way, but I am not one of them.

To really think, I need to have a pen in my hand, writing on a pad of paper.  That's the technology I started thinking with, and it's probably the one I will go out with.  I write the thought, reread it, and add to it.  The ink on the page is a storage buffer--but that's not all it is.  In order to exist as a narrative thought, it seems, I must write it.  Even as I write, ideas appear, ideas that would have remained unthought if I was not writing.

I do have to be careful how I annotate and arrange these notes.  What seems clear when I write can be incomprehensible weeks and months later, when it comes to collate all the thoughts, and distil them into something meaningful.

If you're wondering, I'm a black rollerball on yellow lined paper guy.  Lately I've favored a 5x8 junior-size pad, in a taped-up vinyl pad holder, since that's easiest to toss in my bike panier.

I'll be doing this for the rest of my life.  Even if books disappear, I'm thinking that pens and pads won't, though perhaps, someday, an electronic version with the right feel of stylus on surface will appear, read my handwriting, and store the text in searchable form.  But scratching on a pad will always remain the visible manifestation of my thought.

Portrait and landscape

A few weeks ago I complained about having to get a widescreen monitor when my previous monitor died.  I found the screen too short and too wide, with printed lines as endless as midwestern freight trains.

I've solved the problem, in a fashion.  I upgraded my driver so that it permits screen rotation, and picked up an Omnimount WS3 desktop mount that lets me rotate the screen.  This gives me a tall narrow screen when I want, and a wide one when I want.  The tall one is really tall, so I generally use a window somewhat shorter that the maximum so I don't have to crane up at the top menu.

Here's what it looks like when displaying full text:

And, so you can see the mount, here it is moved out of the way:

BTW, this gives you a decent idea of what my desk usually looks like:  not that messy, given my natural tendencies.  A few souvenirs, art work by offspring, and the all-important container of MetaPhor (actually an agarose I got a lab friend to give to me).

Brain Thief: the book trailer

My publisher has done a book trailer for my novel, Brain Thief.  Check it out:

On getting up early to work

A few years ago, a magazine article changed my life.  In the February 2002 The Atlantic, Joseph Epstein had wrote about he became an Early Riser.  I had gone back to work.  I had two children.  I was getting no work done.  And here Epstein had a straighforward solution:  get up early.

I'd always resisted that.  For me, the best time to get up is 7:15.  Early by some standards, maybe, but certainly leaving only enough time to get ready for work, and go.

Epstein's description of how he faced a similar situation inspired me.  And I did what he did:  I started to get up early.  Not quite the 5 AM he seems to easily manage:  5:30 is pretty good for me.  But that gives me the hour or more that I need to get some writing done.

I won't claim that my eyes snap open and I say "Rejoice, for this is the day the Lord has made."  There's usually some desperate negotiation between various selves, sometimes another warning bleep from the alarm.  It helps if I have a work that's going well--at some level I'm anxious to get back to it.

I weigh myself, go downstairs, turn on the coffee maker, and head down to the cellar, behind the boiler, my place of grace.  At this season I turn on the electric radiator under my desk.  I record my weight in my spreadsheet (the morning self is more obsessive than the daylight self), turn on KBPS (a Portland, Oregon classical station I started listening to because I could get their commentary-light overnight show in my morning), and switch to my Writer user (no internet access, no programs but MS Word), and get to work.

Many nights I don't get to bed early.  I stay up reading.  It makes the morning more painful, but I don't really regret it.  But, like Epstein, if I go through all that trouble and pain and then sit there staring at some inert pixels, I feel like an idiot.  I do my best to get something done.

I'm not advising this for everyone.  But, if like me, you have a life, and a job, and also the need to make your mark somehow, it's really worth a try.  Done right, it's like unconvering a new continent.  It's the discovery of uncolonized, unspoiled time.  No one else is up.  The world is quiet.  Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

And give thanks to Joseph Epstein, who inspired it all.

The only meta-resolution I need

I long ago gave up on New Years resolutions that involved improving myself.  Not that I can't stand improvement, but self-improvement is so incremental that it is not amenable to any great statement of intent.  Instead, I picked a grand meta-resolution:  to make only resolutions that involve having more fun.

I'm not alone in directing my attention to work.  That's fine and necessary:  I have a demanding day job, and write my fiction mornings and weekends.  But I sometimes neglect to have the fun that is kind of the point of being alive.  Making resolutions to do so seems a bit absurd, but I find that they pay off.  I resolve to see more movies, see more friends, and do other things I enjoy.

So today, when a friend called to take advantage of a beautiful snowfall we just had to go cross-country skiing, I did it.  I had things I could have done at home, and even had to consider it a bit, but, really, doing anything else would have been dumb.  I'll see if I can keep it up.  I never get out to the movies enough, even though I make the same resolution on that year after year.  But the meta-resolution remains.

Where I'll be at Arisia

I will be at Arisia (Cambridge, MA  Jan 15-18).  Here is my schedule, with comments:

Friday, 8 PM, The Best Science Fiction of 2009
Ian Randall Strock, Gardners Dozois, Candra Gill, James L. Cambias

People try to put me on panels like this all the time, and I always dodge, because I don't read enough SF in any given year to participate adequately.  But Gardner requested my presence, and I have obeyed.

Saturday, 2 PM, The Next -Punk
Mario Di Giacomo (moderator), Sarah Smith, Rachel Silber, Israel Peskowitz

If I can't keep up with the present, how can I discern the path of the genre in the future?  This time it is my old friend and housemate Rachel Silber who is responsible, and again I obey.

Saturday, 4 PM, Whither Hard SF?
Allen Steele, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Stephen R Wilk, Mark L Van Name

"Whither"? In the future, all hard SF will involve archaic grammatical constructions!

Sunday, 2:30 PM, Reading
Just me.

I'll probably read from the new book, Brain Thief.  What else?

You can get anything you want, as long as it's what everyone else wants

My mother, who grew up in the Soviet Union, always said that about the United States.  So even when she came to this country, in the 50s, she was noticing the lack of a Long Tail.  This wasn't Henry Ford producing Model Ts in only black, this was a general problem of production for small market segments.

We're supposed to be over that, aren't we?  So why am I having so much trouble finding a non-widescreen monitor?  My monitor stopped working yesterday, in the middle of actual dayjob work (I don't usually work from home, but my son broke his leg and needed someone in the house with him).  A quick check with the laptop revealed a huge selection of big widescreen monitors at nice prices--one of which I eventually bought at a Staples around the corner.

I spend most of my time on this screen writing.  A widescreen gives me lines that are too long to read comfortably.  And I have no interest in having multiple windows visible--even single tasking puts a serious strain on my underpowered brain.  Surely I'm not the only one who wants this.  Why, then, is a simple portrait-orientation monitor suddenly so hard to find?

I felt the same way when, back in the days of PDAs, they all went color.  I kept addresses, dates, and other such information on it.  All color meant was that battery life went way down.  Then, with cell phones, the same thing happened.

This isn't some kind of curmudgeonly "I liked it better before" thing--at least I don't think it is.  It's a "why can't I buy it if I want it?" thing.

It's also a "is everyone else crazy?" thing.  I would have guessed the market would be split into the two types, with work-oriented people getting one, and entertainment-oriented people getting the other.  Does this show I would have failed in monitor marketing, or that I would have scored a success in an underserved market segment?

Just mark this market segment underserved.

A rose by any other name

How many articles, books, and blog posts have this as a title?  I'm not even going to google it--go ahead if you want to.

But the question is, would it smell as sweet?  More and more studies show how subject our perceptions are to context, expectation, and the inherent hacked-together nature of our sensory circuits.  We think we perceive things, but that is largely an illusion.  Sometimes this happens even when we are prepared for it:  even if you know the lines in the optical illusion are actually straight, you see them as curved.

But when Juliet goes into her semiotic discussion of Romeo's name (Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II) she's misleading us--part of the excitement of Romeo is that he is forbidden, a bad boy Montague.  If he changed his name, he'd be less interesting.

A company name is that way too.  It seems like no big deal--let's call ourselves something, people know how good we are at what we do, after all, it won't make much difference.  Only it can, it really can.  People, even in their professional capacities, make capricious and arbitrary decisions all the time.  They don't t hink they do, of course.  If holding something warm makes you think of a new person you meet as having a warmer personality, without your having any idea that you're being influenced, you have to know that a company's name can influence you at an unconscious level.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to drop half a million dollars on that plausible branding company's year-long rebranding scheme, but it does mean you shouldn't take it for granted.  And you should give it the time and resources it deserves.

This is occupying a certain amount of my time at work, with a fair amount of stress.

Afterlife porn

From Cat Valente, a brilliant post on mainstream attempted use of fantasy techniques without really understanding them (via the estimable Theodora Goss), and the creation of a useful term:  afterlife porn.

Because that's it. What passes for fantastic fiction in the mainstream is almost entirely this: "You Will Not Die, And Neither Will Those You Love". There are other elements, certainly, but that is the underlying point of its writing and its reading.

So, of course, there is no underlying logic or structure to it. The more fictional plausibility the author creates, the less spiritual plausibility it has, because it becomes about the writer's creative work, and not the reader's denial of death. Those damn writers and their fictions. Just messes up a good book.

The still-living spirits of the dead are not part of daily life (for most people, anyway), so techniques of fantastic fiction seem a natural tool to use. But in the cases at hand these techniques are the accidents of fantasy, and not their substance (using the terminology of Aristotelian physics for literary criticism is perverse, I'm aware, and I suppose there are better literary terms for what I'm talking about, but I don't know what they are--Dora will know).

In her own post referring to Ms. Valente's rant, Dora (I use her first name because, believe or not, I actually know her.  Not her fault, it just happened) goes off on The Time Traveler's Wife.  Now, I actually liked TTTW better than she did (and felt weird liking it--not my usual thing), but it, again, is about denial of death. Dora sees it as a Scenes From a Marriage kind of thing merely, but I think it too is a kind of afterlife porn, with that being a significant emotional element.

Now Ms. Valente and Dora have me thinking, always a dangerous thing. Fear of death makes you accept all sorts of implausibilities. There are people who believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and the afterlife, all at the same time. I suspect those people are not usually readers of my books, or Ms. Valente's or Dora's either.

"In Our Time"

I ride my bike to work and listen to lectures and podcasts while I do it. Not optimally safe, I suppose, but I can hear traffic, and I've been doing it for years.

Aside from The Teaching Company classes I've mentioned before, I like the various episodes of In Our Time, from BBC4.  Melvyn Bragg interviews three different people a week, usually university professors, on a topic of intellectual interest, whether Boethius, the Ediacaran biota, or Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Bragg is pretty good at keeping the various dons on topic.

The most recent episode is available on the site as a podcast, and you can listen to the previous ones. I particularly liked the one on the Baroque, and the aforementioned revenge tragedy one.  Bragg did a four part series on Darwin, in honor of the anniversary, that was fun and comprehensive.

Writers and word counts

Some writers post their daily word count on their blogs. To me that seems both weirdly intimate and completely uninformative, but maybe that's because I do not manage to generate anywhere near as many words as these people tend to. Word counters don't seem to post things like "15", "121", "0", "0", "erased everything I wrote last week and then threw up"--they post robust and intimidating numbers instead.

It's not that I don't track my word production. I do. I even (to be weirdly intimate in my own way) graph moving averages, etc. as a way of making sure I'm keeping my pace up.

But that number, while not completely meaningless, is quite misleading. I generally write a lot, and then spend a lot of time rewriting, cutting, rewriting, cutting. I don't usually throw up, but that would not be out of place. So for me that word production number is more "wheat seed sown" rather than "baked loaves of bread delivered". In the current credit environment, no one is lending me money against that.

Five reasons writers don't improve with age

I had dinner with my old friend Bob Klonowski last week, and he asked me an exasperated question:  why do writers seem to get worse as they get older? If writing is a skill (and it certainly is), why shouldn't increased experience with technique, as well as extended encounters with other human beings, cause writers to improve? He had had several bad experiences with writers he had once enjoyed, and was interested in an explanation.

I didn't have an answer, or even any good counterexamples, but in a related article, Terry Teachout, recently wrote about artists who stop producing, indicating that this is often a good thing, because later work, when produced, tends not to match the quality of earlier, thus bolstering Bob's point.

"I'm a big fan of his early work" is a standard joke.  But is it true?  And if it is, why is it true?

I had a couple of explanations for Bob, and a couple I thought of later.

1. Lack of editing.  Many writers are more the creations of their editors than they would like to acknowledge.  Chop the worst-quality 10 percent (or 20 percent, or 30) of any work, and it likely would be improved.  In a writer's early days, the editorial requirements often cause that to happen. When a writer starts selling, and has a reputation, editing falls by the wayside. Even formerly perceptive friends and colleagues are deluded by the simple fact of success into thinking that editing is no longer as important.
2. Related to lack of editing is the simple fact that a writer has to be better to make a reputation than to keep one. Once a reputation is achieved, reviewers look less carefully, and readers who have developed a taste for what the writer has to offer are willing to put up with a diluted or cut product in order to get it. Marketers have an existing hook to sell the books with, which makes sales relatively easier to achieve.  Having market dominance means that quality is less important as part of the total sales package.  And, since quality is painfully hard to achieve, and successful writers have speaking gigs, tours, and other distractions to contend with, they are disinclined to torture themselves.
3. With increasing age, there are basic failures of cognition. Sad, and agist, but unfortunately true. The number of words you can see ahead goes down. The skein of detailed relationships is harder to perceive. The reader of the final book doesn't see it, but the act of writing is as fraught as surfing and as reflexive as Whac-A-Mole. It gets harder to manage, and thus scarier, leading to writer's block. One hopes that increasing experience can compensate, but sometimes it doesn't.
4. Some writers just don't have that much to say. They have a few experiences, some key perceptions, a limited repertory company of characters, and a couple of verbal tricks. Book One is fabulous and original, Book Two revisits the successes of the first, Book Three is a chastening attempt to try something new that doesn't come off, and successive volumes after that are rewrites of Books One and Two.
5. And, finally (related to the above), maybe the original books weren't really that good in the first place. You were the right age and having the right experiences to be charged up when you read them, but if you read them now, you would like them no better than that obese volume squatting loathsomely on your nightstand that some enthusiastic review persuaded you to buy against your better judgment.

Not all these explanations apply to every writer, of course.  Maybe the trick is to start late in life, like Penelope Fitzgerald, after some other career, thus avoiding unfortunate comparisons with youth.

Anyone know a decent writer who became better with age?

Having a day job means seriously setting priorities

One thing a day job does take is time. I mean, they make me be at work all day. And, as if that weren't enough, I have to be working on the stuff they pay me for. My other job is of no interest to them.

That means I spend most of my weekends working on my writing career. That's fine, but that career has a lot of other parts to it other than creating prose. For example, my book is coming out in a little over a month, and, aside from trying to entice you with my witty blog postings, I haven't done that much to promote it.

I feel that creating the work comes first. And it's easy to fall completely behind. If story and novel inventories are empty, it takes an incredibly long time to fill them again. Once the pipelines have something in them, keeping them flowing is somewhat less fraught.

So I've decided to focus on more short stories and the next book, rather than publicity for the one coming up. That may prove to be a long-term error--there is no guarantee that the next book will be picked up unless Brain Thief does well.

Watch with me, and see how my decisions pan out.

Behind the boiler

Occasionally a magazine or web site will run photographs of writers' spaces.  Now, I presume they are tidied, fluffed, and art-directed before the photograph is taken--I've never seen one with a crumb-covered plate or even a decent layer of random paper.  But even taking that into account, they tend to look kind of artistic, with interesting curios, favorite chairs, antique desks, that kind of thing.

I work behind the boiler in my basement.  Now, this is not as grim as it might be--the basement is fairly dry, the walls are painted white, we removed the asbestos.  But...once I brought home a Taunton Press book on basements.  If you've ever looked at a Taunton Press book for ideas on how to redo your kitchen, or your attic, or your orangerie, you know that they don't really give you any information useful to a normal person.  In this case, none of the basements were actually underground.  They all seemed to be part of houses built into hills, so at least one wall actually had windows that looked out on something.  It was pretty annoying, actually.

I don't have windows that look down on anything.  I work by artificial life, day and night.  I've covered the walls with geologic maps of Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon (lots of nice colors).  I have books all around me.  My desk is a butcher block door on two filing cabinets that I've had ever since my first apartment, a long time ago.  I have to put on headphones when someone is watching the TV, which is in the other part of the basement.  There are worse things.

Still, I'd like a nicer space.  I'd like the kind of space a magazine might print.  Someday, maybe.

Brands and satisficing

The slogan of the Sycamore Hill Writer's Conference is "Adequate Science Fiction", based on the principle that "good enough" is, well, good enough.

The writers who attend Syc Hill (of which I have been one) don't believe this at all, of course.  They are aiming at something far beyond "adequate", the use of a litotes (a rhetorical word for "understatement") being a signature turn of the fancy pants literary SF writer.

But humans are not maximizing creatures.  We are "satisficing" creatures:  if seeking out the best takes too long or expends too many resources, then it isn't "the best", not from a resource-conserving standard.  Good enough, found quickly, beats really good, found with difficulty and effort.

Brands (and genres too--I'll get to that at some point) are search-conserving heuristics (to use some fancy pants rhetoric of my own).  They seem to compress a lot of information into a narrowband signal, because they evoke information you already have cached.  We perceive little and process less, and the best way to get to us is to tell us something we already know, disguised as something new.  Effortless revelation follows.  They enable us to find the adequate, quickly.

So a brand (like, say, a writer you may be thinking of reading) should be consistent, so that it can quickly inform you of something you already know.  Writers who think their brand can just be "quality literature" quickly learn that that's too vague--and, frankly, too difficult to deliver on consistently.  We all think we keep our quality high at all costs, but aside from someone like Ted Chiang, we are mostly fooling ourselves.  Better "military science fiction" or "the guy with the weird aliens".  Those are attributes whose quality can vary quite a bit before you get into trouble.  They can convey something you already know.

What is my own brand?  I'm still working on that one.