The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
My buddy D. Emery Bunn’s debut novel Darkness Concealed is out today! Head over to Amazon and check it out, and look for an interview with him later this week. I ask stupid questions and he puts up with them! It’s fun!
There may be too many exclamation points in this post.
This is from the same fuckers who wanted a thousand dollars from me last week to do some shit that I could do for myself for free. This person appears to not be aware that they sent me the previous letter, and holy shit they’re not even trying. I hate this company a lot.
I will not turn the page over. I also will not even open the next letter.
This post has been burning up the internet for the last couple of days, and for good reason. Give it a look, if you’re an indie author.
If you write YA or adult genre novels, particularly if you have a manuscript lying around that you haven’t done anything with yet, you probably ought to be checking Pitch Wars out. I have at least four other things I ought to be doing right now but I’m going through their mentor list right now, and I’m not sure I’m making a bad decision in it either.
So this has happened– Amazon has introduced a new program called “Kindle Unlimited,” where for a flat fee of $9.99 a month you can download and read as many books as you want on your Kindle and keep them for as long as you’d like, so long as you keep paying the $9.99 a month.
I’m not sure what kind of deal they worked out with the actual publishing companies, but apparently us lowly independent folk get paid the same way we did for the Kindle Lending Library– if you’re enrolled in Kindle Select, you’re in, and you get a portion of the money they set aside for KS people every month each time your book gets borrowed. Which, I should point out, isn’t a bad deal at all, or at least it doesn’t sound like one on paper.
Except:
The Benevolence Archives has moved nearly 500 copies– significantly more as a free book than paid, but that’s still not nothing– and has never once been downloaded by someone on the lending library. So this is not really a thing that appeals to me as an author, although as a reader I’m thinking about checking it out.
Here’s the interesting thing, though: since they’ve altered the terms of the Kindle Select deal by creating this program, they’re allowing anyone currently involved in Kindle Select to remove their book from the program even if they’re not through with their 90 days yet. Mine don’t run out for a few more weeks, but I’d already decided that I didn’t see the advantage of the program, so I’m gonna pull it early. Which means that 1) I can make it available at the various other online services (Barnes and Noble! Smashwords! Apple!) and 2) I have a bit more flexibility about price.
I’ll let y’all know what ends up happening with that as soon as it’s happened.
I have been nominated for a fair number of WordPress blog awards in the past year, and I’ve ignored almost all of them. That’s not because I’m not grateful, because I am; it’s always awesome when people think of my blog in any remotely positive context, much less in a context involving a prize, but because I end up having to write the same post, more or less, over and over. I need to start working on recognizing other blogs more often, and the awards help with that, but it’s not at the top of the priority list just yet. (He said, smarmily.)
Anyway. It stands to reason, then, that the one time I see a viral blog post happening that I want to post an entry for, no one nominates me. 🙂 So I’m pretending that Taylor Grace or Part Time Monster nominated me, and I’m going to re-tag Winter Bayne and Gene’O over at The Writing Catalog just to be a jerk.
On to the questions:
1. Why do I write what I do?
I write, loosely defined, speculative fiction— mostly of the science fiction and fantasy genres, with a smattering of heavily H.P. Lovecraft-influenced horror mixed in there as well. Trouble is, for the most part I can’t keep my genres straight. Those three were what I read most as a kid (and, truth be told, still do) so they’re what I associate “writing” with. When I’m not writing fiction? Well… look around. My nonfictional/blog stuff is mostly about teaching, although I’ll write about anything that strikes me around here and my blog is frequently filled with nonsense.
2. How does my writing process work?
Blogging is first-draft, sit-down-and-go stuff, and once I can get started (which can take a while) if I’m writing nonfiction I write insanely quickly– I once pulled off a thirty-page paper in a few hours in grad school. Got an A, too. Fiction requires hours, days or weeks of “thinking” (read: procrastination) and is much, much slower, although one benefit of the advanced thinkytimes is that my first drafts tend to be pretty clean.
If I’m doing blog posts, nothing is required– I can bang out a blog post while watching my son and cooking dinner at the same time. (And I’ve done that.) Fiction requires solitude, music, the house to be reasonably clean, nothing else hanging over my head, and music. I’m thinking of keeping a running soundtrack of my current novel, actually, which so far includes Murs, Mika, and Meg Myers, because apparently iTunes got stuck on M yesterday.
3. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Genre-bending and humor, although I think tonally my work sounds a lot like John Scalzi, if John Scalzi were about a third as good as he is, and that might be overstating my abilities. But, yeah, the genre-bending. My series The Benevolence Archives involves ogres and gnomes and dwarves who ride around in spaceships, so I clearly don’t know what the hell I’m doing in keeping genres together. My first novel, Click, was originally going to be a Conan-type barbarian sword & sorcery thing and somehow ended up with the first major scene being set in an antique shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Hopefully this means fans of either genre will like me; the darker parts of my brain think it’s going to ghettoize me out of existence.
I suspect I was bad at coloring in the lines as a kid.
(You can buy The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 at Amazon right here, if you like.)
4. What am I working on at the moment?’
Two projects: One, a Benevolence Archives novel (the piece linked above is a short story collection and is novella-length) and two, an entry for the Baen Books Fantasy Adventure Award that is– eek– due in just a couple of weeks. The contest entry is kinda giving me fits, because of the genre-bending tendencies I discussed above: it’s wanting to bend toward horror more than I think a “fantasy adventure” story ought to, and I either need to rein it in in a direction I don’t think the story wants to go or give up on submitting it and come up with something else. Which… God, who knows how long that could take.
(Oh, and random advice: if you’re going to take a picture of your workstation for a blog post, make absolutely sure there isn’t a credit card sitting on your desk, face-up, right next to your keyboard! That is an incredibly bad idea!)
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.