The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I wrote six thousand nine hundred and one words today.
The Benevolence Archives: The Sanctum of the Sphere is FINISHED. Although I may still change the title.
I do believe that taking the day off was the right idea.
Wait shit it’s January 16th.
I don’t care. That picture was a pain in the ass to get focused properly and I’m not retaking it. 🙂
EVERYBODY MOTHERFUCKING DANCE!
Douglas Wynne, who I had never heard of prior to this morning, has suddenly popped up all over the place advertising his new book, Red Equinox. His piece at Whatever and this essay at Terrible Minds have already sold me the book. Check ’em out.
Quite fun, to look at a bookshelf and see a nice series of books that have your work in them. The copy of SKYLIGHTS on the right there is the “final” edition, the one you’ll get when you order it from Amazon for only $12.95, and what looks like a bunch of scrape and fold marks that leading edge there is actually shininess from the glossy cover. I think I might have preferred the matte, ultimately, but who knows. Order one, and then you can help me decide which it should be!
(Incidentally: I feel like there’s something inappropriate about shelving myself next to Elie Wiesel, and that’s probably not going to last. It’s where I had room on a shelf. :-))
There are a handful of posts planned to varying degrees of completion in my head right now, including one that I actually promised someone would hit a couple of days ago and haven’t gotten to yet. This week has been startlingly tiring; I went to bed way too early yesterday and may well follow that with going to bed way too early tonight too. But, in the relatively near future, one or more of these may happen:
I have taken tomorrow off. I am chaining myself to this computer all day, and I’m getting the first draft done if it kills me. It might. It’s going to require a very high-productivity day, but getting it done is definitely possible if I’m able to keep my head on straight and not get distracted. I’m done blowing deadlines, dammit.
How’re you?
Here’s the good news:
(The cover’s less pinkish than it looks there. Artifact of the lighting. The color balance is about where I wanted it.)
Here’s the bad news:
That was supposed to be in all-caps, and somehow not only did I fail to hit the Caps Lock key while typing it, I failed to notice the fucking mistake until it was in my hands. And while my wife and a couple of helpful Twitter folks claimed it didn’t look bad, I cannot abide this font in lower-case, particularly that “e”. So it had to be fixed. Also fixed, unnecessarily: adding some space to the front of each chapter and switching the cover from matte to glossy at my wife’s suggestion.
Not altered: the interior font, on account of the number of issues I thought it could introduce. I’m told sans-serif fonts are never used inside books. Be prepared to embrace diversity on that particular point.
Oddly, something about those two changes altered the minimum price– I think I may have gone over an invisible page count threshold when I added the space to the chapters. The print cost will be $12.95, which I think is entirely reasonable for a book of this quality. (The print quality, I mean. The quality of the words is up to you guys.)
It’s back in review, but I’m going to skip the proof stage at this point– there’s nothing changed that should cause additional problems– so being available by Friday is still within reach. I will, most obviously, be letting you know. 🙂
Yes. This. Remember this.
Today I am going to share some eye-opening truths, which might shatter the illusions regarding the book publishing business and crush the dreams of some folk out there. I have recently come across a rather interesting blog post link in the comments section under a post at Suffolk Scribblings blog.
It was a rather grim post by author Kameron Hurley. For those who are not familiar with her, she is an established author who has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Locus Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in prestigious SFF magazines such as Lightspeed, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has been translated into Romanian, Swedish, Spanish, and Russian. She is also a graduate of Clarion West. Impressive credentials many of us dream about accomplishing some day, if ever.
According to her…
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Okay, I know I literally JUST SAID I wasn’t posting more than once a day for a while, but there’s absolutely no way I can pass up reblogging this amazing story.
I recently read my first Sci Fi book… at least I think it was the first, and yet… in a life of reading I must have read one before and anyway it was listed under adventure, and I am always up for that. 
I enjoyed Skylights very much and reviewed it on Amazon. I read it because I have become interested in the author Luther M. Siler via his blog and happened to read the opening of this book which gripped me. It is set in the future, but starts in a schoolroom as the assembled children are watching the launch of the Challenger in 1986.
However, I had forgotten, I have been to space before, nearly thirty years ago. Our youngest daughter decided, age four, that she wanted to be an astronaut. So we made her a space ship. Here are the engineers at work.
For christmas that year she…
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So I went to the doctor today, to see if she could tell me why I keep hearing whooshing sounds all the time, and she diagnosed me with constantly missing self-imposed deadlines. The sounds I’m hearing are my own goddamned deadlines flying past my head.
Enough of this.
Posting around here will be minimal– once daily, at most– until the damn book is done.
Send happy thoughts.
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