The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Giving away, oh, ten copies or so. You’ll have to download it through Smashwords but they carry all the relevant formats.
Leave a comment. I’ll pick up your email address through that and I’ll get back to you with a code later today.
Meanwhile, The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is perma-free over there and has been for a while.
How’s this for a first sentence that should cause deep, creeping dread in any author: my favorite thing about Lock In, by John Scalzi, is the cover.
That’s the greatest damning-with-faint-praise sort of sentence of all time, right? But seriously: I love love love the cover to this book. I’m not sure what it is about it that I like so much other than the fact that it stands out from everything else on the shelves so well, but… damn.
(EDIT: Scalzi himself has popped up on Twitter to let me know that Peter Lutjen is the artist who did the cover; he was also responsible for the cover for Scalzi’s Redshirts. He doesn’t appear to maintain his own site or I’d link to it, but he does a lot of work for Tor. There’s a neat article about the production of the cover here.)
Weird detail: my copy (which I got in a signed edition through Subterranean press; the rest of you can’t even buy this until later this week MWA HA HA) says “A NOVEL OF THE NEAR FUTURE” across the bottom of the book. There are images on Google that say “A NOVEL” in the same place, but I can’t find an image of the actual cover my book has anywhere– including on Scalzi’s own website. Which is weird.
But anyway. Scalzi is one of my favorite working authors, and his work is especially near and dear to my heart because I think when I’m writing at my best he and I sound a lot alike. I’m a huge China Miéville fan, right? I couldn’t write like Miéville if my life depended on it. I love Alastair Reynolds’ work, but I couldn’t write Reynolds-style books either. Scalzi, on the other hand, and for whatever reason, is a writer whose works I tend to thoroughly mentally dissect as I’m reading them, because I think he and I have similar senses of humor and we want to write the same style of books. I finished Lock In overnight. My last book before that, Scott Lynch’s Republic of Thieves, took a week.
I’d rather write books you can read overnight. 700-pagers aren’t my style. I am a fan of the semicolon; John just wrote an entire book in which he ruthlessly removed all of them on purpose, partially because he thought he liked them too much. (Yes, I did that on purpose.) We both tend to be dialogue-heavy as opposed to description-heavy. Things like that.
(I should be clear: he’s way better at all of this stuff than me. I’m not saying I’m as good as Scalzi, although I certainly aspire to be. Just that if I had to pick a pro author and say “I”m gonna be that guy when I’m rich and famous!” it’d be him.)
Anyway. Right: the book. Lock In is a bit of a departure for Scalzi because it’s not a space opera, the genre that the majority of his books have fallen into. It’s a near-future detective novel, taking place in a world where a disease called Haden’s Syndrome has imprisoned a certain percentage of the world’s citizens in their own bodies. He’s taken that simple premise, extrapolated forward an extra twenty or thirty years to give society a chance to mature a bit, and then written a murder mystery.
Which is an awesome way to do a science fiction novel, because it lets him stretch into another genre (crime fiction) while still staying in his wheelhouse of sci-fi as he’s doing it. This is not my favorite Scalzi book (that would be a tie between Old Man’s War and Redshirts, which is one of a very small number of books that actually made me cry while I was reading it) but it’s still a book that I think most of you should be reading. The setting is deeply interesting, the characters are fun, and the mystery/procedural itself has enough twists and turns in it that it felt like a seasoned pro was writing it and not someone who was trying his first novel in the genre. I gave it five stars on Goodreads. You should give it a look.
(Yeah, I just talked about myself for 500 words and the book for 150. That’s why it says “sorta” in the title up there. Shuddup.)
Got this in the mail yesterday. Fascinatingly, it was sent to Luther Siler— who, remember, isn’t a real person– at my actual physical address. The number of organizations that can pair his name with my address are… limited. And I am not happy with them.
This is page 3 of a three-page letter; I’m not going to bother reproducing the first two. If you happen to get this in the mail, you should throw it the hell away.
Before we start, the first page is a fake check for $601. Their “Ultimate Publishing Package” costs $1600, meaning that with their “discount” you’re only spending nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars of your money– before they make you a single dime, and as we’ll see it’s going to be more than that anyway.
Let’s walk through this “offer” bit by bit, shall we?
Fuck these folks, and I seriously want to have a word with whoever sold them my address. If you get mail from them, throw it away. They’re assholes.
So I spent money on two things at Staples tonight; one of them I’ll likely talk about sometime in the next couple of days, but no promises. The second one was this:
This is, quite obviously, not going to be its final resting place– for starters, I’m gonna frame it, and second, there’s no way it lives in front of my prized autographed Dave Dorman Hoth print. But I thought it thematically appropriate to put the two of them together for the picture. Plus the cats can’t get to it up there. 🙂
And holy god does that thing look outstanding printed. Have I singled out and bragged about the artist on this site yet? Her name is Yvonne Less, but she goes by Diverse Pixel, and you can find out more about her work here. She doesn’t know this yet, but she’s also doing the cover for the Benevolence Archives novel. I don’t even have a title for the damn book yet and I can’t wait to see her cover.
(About the shower curtains: they’re a baby proofing measure, designed to keep the boy from trying to climb the bookshelves while still allowing me to see all my books. There are twelve six-foot bookshelves in this room alone, so we had to come up with something.)
…let’s see if they leave this one up. I’ve taken a screenshot just in case. Thanks, Jon R. Helms!
Mental note: when testing out new themes for the blog, don’t use the iMac with the 27″ screen. Because Jesus God is that header enormous on the laptop and unreadable on the phone. I really love it, but I may have to go back to something different so that everyone who doesn’t have a Hulk-sized monitor can view at least a little of the blog without scrolling down. Continuing to fiddle, at any rate.
If you haven’t looked yet, be sure to scroll down a post to see the just-released cover for the Benevolence Archives short story collection, which I hope to have available before school lets out. There are two stories still being worked on, but you can read one of the stories (six, currently) that will be included here. The couple of you who volunteered to be beta readers for Skylights, stay tuned– I haven’t forgotten about you, I just didn’t manage to get the stuff sent out before the DC trip and I’ve been trying to get my feet back under me ever since. (Ask my wife: today will be the first day I haven’t fallen asleep on the couch after work in two solid weeks.)
Picking a cover for a book is interesting. I’m specifically commissioning a cover for Skylights; I’ve given the artist some direction and a copy of the book to read, but other than that he’s a professional artist and I’m going to go with whatever he comes up with. I didn’t want to spend the money to do that kind of cover for the BA collection, though– at a maximum of $2.99 a pop (and I may go less) it’s going to take forever to make even a small amount of money back– so I found a ebook covers website and bought/customized the one you see below. The punchline is that I looked at it, thought “Ooh, that looks like a Benevolence spidership,” and bought it, and then in a blaze of glory last night constructed an entire story (BA 7, which will be included in the collection) based on the cover image I’d already bought. Which, honestly, ain’t a bad way to handle these cover farm websites– pick out a cover that you really like on its own merits and then write the story that makes the cover make sense. I’ve got two or three on my favorites list already that I’m going to approach in precisely that fashion. And I found a cover that would be great for Balremesh if Balremesh weren’t a micro-short and thus not something that really is ever going to need a cover.
Lessee. What else? My kids haven’t been bastards this week, at least not in my class, although I’ve had a serious rash of my own students getting in trouble in other people’s classrooms lately. That said, tomorrow is probably going to be exhausting, but I’ll hold off talking about it too much until it actually happens– I have to give a “practice test” for the ISTEP multiple choice that is supposed to happen next week– “supposed to” because who knows how bad the test is going to be fucked up this year; I have no faith at all that it’s going to go well, and my kids are testing in the afternoon because of a general lack of appropriate computers in our building, so their scores are going to be all fucked up. But as I said that’s probably tomorrow’s post. Which will be late, come to think of it, because I’m doing a study session for my Algebra kids after school tomorrow and then going to the comic shop.
Gah. I’m tired already.
Wanna do me a favor?
I’m looking for beta readers– at least a couple, but a few more is fine– for my novel Skylights, due to be self-published in ebook form in June. It’s already in pretty good shape, but it wants for one more pass before I push it out to the universe and I figure I might as well have a couple of other folks take a critical eye to it before I release it into the world.
Specifically: Skylights is a roughly 100,000 word novel (over 400 pages in traditional paperback size) about the first few human missions to Mars. I’m looking for people who enjoy science fiction, but don’t feel like you have to have everything Heinlein wrote memorized or anything. I’m asking you to commit to getting the novel read and some sort of written critique (a couple of pages, maybe, and if you like more is fine?) back to me within a reasonable time frame– say, by the last week of April. For this I will thank you in the novel itself; I’m not actually offering any real compensation. I don’t need line edits or anything like that; my wife is a former editor and the manuscript should still be awfully clean, although if you find something and want to point it out that’s fine; I’m mostly looking for story-level critiques.
I’m planning on sending out .PDF files, but if you’d like it in some other format we can figure that out.
Interested? Let me know in comments. I don’t have any particular ideas for who I want but folks whose names I recognize are a bit more likely to be chosen if for some reason I end up with a ton of volunteers.
Thanks!
I’m not entirely sure what put the idea for this post into my head, but once I thought about it it had to be written. I do a fair amount of recommending authors I like on here, I think, but everybody’s got those few people– sometimes they’re writers, sometimes actors or directors or whatever– who everyone likes but you, and in my case I kinda hate knowing that there are books out there that I haven’t read that lots of people like and for whatever reason I can’t get through them to save my damn life. So here’s my list: Great Writers who I Can’t Read. (NOTE: this is distinct from Great Writers who I Won’t Read, which is another, expressly political list.)
William Faulkner. My failure to enjoy William Faulkner hurts my soul, guys. I’ve tried to read, I dunno, four or five of his books? Absalom, Absalom!, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and The Sound and the Fury, which I think I read all of. Or at least looked at all of the words of. Plus a couple of others I at least tried. I cannot abide nonlinear narratives, guys. I don’t know why; it’s a hole in my brain, and Faulkner loves him some nonlinear narrative. I desperately want Faulkner to be one of my favorite writers. I can’t do it.
William Gibson. Maybe I just don’t like guys named William; I dunno. I’ve read Neuromancer maybe three times. I’ve read several of his other books. I can’t tell you a single damn thing about any of them. And yet I still have this visceral “Ooh! New William Gibson book!” reaction every time something by him comes out. And then I either come to my senses and don’t buy it or I do and halfway through it I don’t know the main character’s name and have no idea what the hell’s going on and I abandon it, again, defeated. There’s a book of essays by him literally less than a foot away from me, that a co-worker loaned to me and insisted I check out. The same thing will happen. It’s depressing.
Charlie Stross. Speaking of highly regarded science fiction authors: I have no earthly reason to dislike Charlie Stross’ work. Every book he writes has a premise that makes me think I should love it. The man wrote a book called Rule 34, for God’s sake, which ought to by rights be directly in my wheelhouse. I am wrong, every single time. Even Accelerando, which may have the most brilliant opening chapter in all of science fiction, and made me think that maybe, just maybe this was the Charlie Stross book that was finally going to crack him open for him, fell apart for me by the end. Dammit.
Ursula K. Le Guin. Please don’t hit me. Again, I’ve read most of her major works. I’ve actually read The Left Hand of Darkness more than Neuromancer. Couldn’t tell you a single goddamn thing about it.
The greatest science fiction heresy, and the one I’ll stop with, because every right-thinking person will hate me once they read this? Philip K. Dick. Guys I have like eight of his books and I haven’t really liked any of them. Half the time I have no fucking idea what the hell’s going on. At least with Dick I know he’s writing them that way on purpose; my idea is that Dick’s books are supposed to be carefully pulled apart, which is not how I read, but shit, man, I’ve read shit by him that switched narrators mid-paragraph. Fuuuuuck that.
Okay, one more sci-fi author: Robert Heinlein. This one could be worse, because at least I liked Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land wasn’t that bad, although it didn’t exactly enchant me. My wife made me read Time Enough for Love, one of her favorite books; I despised what I read and I’m almost certain I didn’t finish it. She’s put The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on my unread shelf and is insisting I get to it; I’m secretly hoping I have reason to be hospitalized soon, because several days of being bedridden with no other options may be the only way I read the damn thing.
Outside science fiction: Ernest Hemingway. I may have taken a shot at all of his major works over the course of the last twenty years ago. I have failed repeatedly to understand his brilliance. I dislike not being able to read major American literary greats, have you noticed that?
Bonus Non-Author But Still A Writer Dude: Stanley Kubrick. I sorta liked The Shining. The first third of Full Metal Jacket ain’t bad. I’ve actively hated every other movie of his I’ve ever seen, and I spent good portions of Clockwork Orange literally trying to make myself die with my brain.
Sigh.
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