Spring Cleaning For The Mind

Observing my own increasing trend for writing anywhere but actually in my home office - on the bus, in the park, in the cafe (bad for caffeine consumption!), I started to wonder if there might be something going on.

It could not possibly be the stacks of old Locus, Australian Author and Queensland Writer's Centre magazines, or the teetering piles of books - both read and unread. Nor the archive boxes stuffed with odd assortments, the piles of mouldering manila folders or the half of the office that has its floor area taken up with carefully deposited critique responses (patiently waiting for their turn), some of which may require carbon dating. I mean there is plenty of room to move the chair back - I hardly even even to squeeze through to sit at the desk.

Well . . . OK. The message finally started to sink in that five years is definitely long enough between spring cleans. So began the painful, painful process of trying to sort through all this gumph. Thankfully I managed to pull off a small miracle and use some storage area in a void under the house. But half a ton of paper had to be tossed (don't worry I recycled it).

After a long weekend spent tidying, sorting and dusting, I managed to reduce my office to something approaching minimalist. I could not believe the difference it made. I actually like being in the place now!

It made me realise that over time a kind of psychic detritus can accumulate along with all this garbage. You see all that crap, and somehow it gets bound up with all the negative feelings you accumulate toward your craft (well at least for me). It did me a lot of good to blow away the cobwebs. Physically dealing with this environment helped to clear the mental slate tremendously.

So how do you arrange your work environment? How do you keep the psychic cobwebs from accumulating, or do you keep the poor underpaid cafe workers in a job?

I Demand That You Meet My Needs!

I was wondering what to post today when I came across this piece. It seems the combination of altruism and wanting justice is so deeply built in it can be observed in babies. Me being me I immediately wondered if longitudinal studies would show a connection between the babies with least empathy and sociopathic behavior, but that's a can of worms I'll deal with elsewhere and elsewhen. I don't have time to go chasing those worms today (long story involving Life Gone Feral and Job Gone Feral playing together).

What I'm interested in for today's post is this: how much classic fiction of all flavors involves the bad guy getting punished? Rather a lot, as it happens. It's only recently that the fad for non-judgmental stuff started poisoning the well, and gee, it runs so much against the grain that even babies approve (for baby values of approval, which probably means aren't upset by) of bad guys being punished, and presumably good guys being rewarded.

We, as a species, clearly want justice.

When we can't get it in our lives - which is inevitable, the world being inherently unjust - we use fiction to restore our sense of 'fair'. Especially when anyone who tries to get justice or fairness in life by imposing it is going to end up with megalomaniacal dictators making everyone else equally miserable. It's one of those nasty consequences of human fallibility. You can add it to the laundry list.

Since divine justice doesn't show any signs of manifesting in our regular lives (or at least, I haven't seen any bullying bosses/coworkers/politicians/used car salesmen/insert villain of choice being struck by random lightning lately), we have to meet our needs through - you guessed it - fiction. I'm sure it's dreadfully primitive and barbaric and all to want people who hurt others to be punished, but there you go.

And of course, we can rationalize ourselves into the most amazing places where someone can slaughter millions "for their own good". The last I heard no-one ever conclusively decided on the question of whether, if you sincerely believe that not belonging to religion X will condemn someone to eternal torment, it's justifiable to kill the people of country Y who will never, ever believe what you believe. (Not naming names, but certain people in the Middle East have decided that the answer is 'yes'. So do a few people elsewhere. One or two. And if you believe there's that few I've got a nice bridge in Nevada I'd like to sell you).

Certainly, the books I've enjoyed most have been when the bad guy - whether irredeemable evil (usually those are kind of unsatisfying once they stop being the shadowy figure behind the Bad Things) or one of the ones who's managed to twist and self-rationalize into evil - gets what I feel he - or she - deserves. And of course the heroes of the piece are rewarded appropriately.

My own writing has a funny tendency to spend a lot of time with the folk who walk the knife-edge between having - for whatever the reason - to do horrible things for a good purpose and doing horrible things for a not-good purpose. And of course, a lot of just what makes it good. Or bad. The Vimes's of the world and their darker cousins who can't keep the beast away, so they try to control the damage by aiming it at a greater evil. That's a question that fascinates me.

What about you? What are your most satisfying endings? Do you want the hero rewarded and the villain punished, vice versa, or something in between?

Come to the Dark Side, Writer

I know my colleague, Kate Paulk, has gone into the mind of the villain (come back, Kate, we have cookies. Besides, it’s scary in there) in a few posts, but one of our commenters asked about villains and it occurred to me there are other ways to tackle villains.

Unlike Kate’s, my landing bridge in character-land doesn’t fall naturally in the middle of the evil Lord’s palace, right behind the dark towers and forbidding fortresses. Characters who plot their next coup d’etat while imagining their enemies drowned in bouts of malmsey don’t populate my imagination. On the contrary, for the longest time – forgive me, children, I was young and foolish – I couldn’t really write an evil character. Instead I wrote “and then he suddenly goes mad.” (I said I was young and foolish. Put down your rotten eggs and assorted wilted vegetables.)

And then I found the technique that works for me. While I’m not one of those people who believe everyone is good at heart, I do believe that evil people don’t think that of themselves. They don’t usually walk around twirling their moustaches, rubbing their hands and going nyargh, nyargh, nyargh. And dark cloaks and SERIOUSLY out of fashion.

Put it another way, the most fractured people in our society can’t help having internalized some portion of the common morals and widespread beliefs – stuff like, you don’t kick someone when they’re down. You don’t hurt puppies, children, small defenseless whatever. And we simians are, by nature, likely to want to fit in with our group, so there’s a tendency to cleave to those rules.

But, but, but, you say, didn’t I just say I believe in evil? Am I now going to claim that the people who commit horrors are in fact “just crazy”? Or that society drove them to it?

Put down the rotten eggs again. No, I’m not going to say that. Stop trembling your lip. Here’s the hanky. Do not sniffle in that annoying fashion.

I’m going to say that in most cases – there have been one or two historical exceptions, but those are characters I simply couldn’t write – people do evil by convincing themselves it’s good. It’s either good for the or good for the common people, or good for some grand, imaginary future. (The greatest crimes in human history have been committed in the name of future utopia.)

In fact, a great villain – in books at least – often has the makings of a great hero, except for... some “little” thing. Yes, the bad thing might be a hatred of someone or something. Movies tend to go in for this sort of motive. You’re going to kill the man who raped your mom, or whatever, and your hatred distorts everything out of proportion. The thing though is that though this definitely happens, the scarier horrors are perpetrated out of love.

No you say? Perhaps I should let you sleep at night... Nah, you’re writers and you want to know. The worst villains are the ones who start with a goal everyone would agree is laudable. Say you’re going to rid the world of disease. You start by sending doctors (let’s assume you’re very rich and powerful) everywhere that doesn’t have them. You send enormous amounts of medicine. But little kids keep getting sick because they play in the dirt. And you can’t stand to see them suffer. So you have every toddler killed who can’t be physically restrained from playing in the dirt.

This is an extreme example, and there would be various steps in between, as you trespass more and more on the commonly accepted version of good, but all in the name of a greater ideal. In fact, “the end justifies the means” could be the motto of most villains.

There are the exceptions, too – those who are so full of self-hatred and hatred of others that they “want to see the world burn.” But my penchant is for villains who are doing what they think is for the best and go over a little more and a little more because reality itself – human nature; the way societies work; economics; nature itself – is against them. They see the glimmer of the perfect world before them and they’ll do anything to get there. And they do.

On the flip side of that villain is the hero who sees when he’s doing more harm than good, who accepts limitations and reins himself in no matter how passionate. One of the reasons I love Pratchet’s Vimes is that he is that type of hero. I love the Villains in Phillip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers because they are mostly like that.

What type of villains do you love? Can you see them being tragic heroes with JUST a little difference in their lives? What type of villain would you like to write? Can you make one of your favorite heroes just a little less constrained, a little more ardent and see him become a villain?

Boys Books and Bandits

Who remembers BIGGLES?

Now there were books, unashamedly action books. There's a fan page on Facebook. And a Biggles entry on Wikipedia.


Continuing the theme of male readers that Dave brought up ...

Apparently struggling male readers (4th grade) respond better to female teachers, according to Science Daily.

"Although boys and girls enter kindergarten with similar performance in reading, by the spring of third grade, boys have lower reading scores, which makes this an opportune time for reading intervention."

Now that is a worry. Boys are disengaging from reading as early as the first few years of primary school. See the article here.

And here we have scholarly article on Understanding the Reluctant Male Reader.

"The O'Doherty report (1995) identified various ways boys were significantly over-represented in special language and reading classes. For example, three times more boys than girls were receiving special assistance in New South Wales' schools for reading. Some researchers account for this discrepancy by identifying and defining behaviours associated with learning difficulties. "

Although they did discover that when boys read they read just as well as girls.

"Boys' performance seems to have been facilitated by the high interest material, while girls comprehended nearly as much of the low interest material as the high. Two possible explanations for this phenomenon present themselves: if reading is seen as sex appropriate for girls and sex inappropriate for boys, boys may require the additional incentive of high interest material. An alternate explanation is that girls may have a greater familiarity with vocabulary. This study seems to indicate that some achievement tests may not provide the type of material that encourages boys to demonstrate their abilities. "

And here is a Huffington Post article Dudes Don't Read: The Book Biz's Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
He asked if publishers have given up trying to publish and market books that males want to read. He asks:

"Where are the badass young male writers of today? Would Hunter S. Thompson or Kurt Vonnegut or Brett Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney or Alex Garland or Chuck Palahniuk even get book deals if their debut novels were written today? How can we make reading novels -- and writing them -- cool again for guys under thirty?"

Having just spent weeks marking movie treatments by young males aged between 17 and 25, here are my observations.

7 out of 10 young males want to read/see movies about young men who have to battle evil men/monsters, with a band of like minded young men. The higher the kill count the better.

The other 3 out of 10 young men are incurable romantics and write about falling in love.

I guess there would have to be some romantic males out there, or the human race would never have survived. And, conversely, we need the other 7 out of 10 males to fight off the saber tooth tigers.

Maybe what writers need to give the young male reader is the same wish fulfilment that a romance gives a female, a high kill count, the respect of his fellow men and a machine gun that never needs reloading.

Luckily I'm married to one of the romantics. So, do you think my estimate is accurate?

'Why men don't read books'

Do men read? And if not, why not? And what should we be doing about it?

Following links can be a route to perdition or at least a large waste of time... And occasionally thought-provoking... look, there was always a small statistical probability it has to happen ;-). It, um, has relevance to Amanda's question of yesterday. Eventually accidents will bring readers to your site. The trick is keeping them.

Anyway - to proceed with my easily derailed train of thought. While looking at this article lhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-a-stackpole/publishing-crashes-in-201_b_532795.html (worth reading, but with a little pinch of salt, I think) I happened on a link to this item about another Huffpo item... in Salon. Now anything that called itself ‘salon' does not have much attraction for the hirsute and shaggy fellow that I am, but I read it simply because the title "Why Men don't read Books" http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/05/04/men_don_t_read/index.html is of some interest to me. I want EVERYONE reading. I believe it is vitally important that people do (even if it is not my books that they read. So long as they read).

Now, as a sales pitch for the site, I am afraid the article failed for me, as it's not -- as I was hoping -- a well-referenced and scientifically analytical piece. The only stats Miller gets around to (down in the letters) are rather dodgy as there is none of the required statistical rigor to them - they're a self-selected sample for starters... but it was interesting for the responses it provoked. The curious logic -- in both the responses, subtitle and author's conclusion -- was also quite funny, if you like irony.

Lets start with a few premises here: 1) Some men do read. We're really asking about what they read and why they read that, and why those who don't read, don't, and what the proportions are. Real numbers, real facts. Actually we'd like to know what women read, why, etc., what every possible market/social segment reads. But there is some not very well proven (but I suspect correct) evidence that men are reading and buying less. This really not good news for anyone (even militant feminists who believe all men are EEEEVUL.) It wouldn't be good news if the segment being alienated was Chinese or lesbian or believers in the great Arckleseizure. It's worse-than-average bad news, because if you breed dogs that can bite your head off, having them good-natured, intelligent and thoughtful about possibly doing so is more important than if you're breeding Toy Poms (think about that, if it doesn't make your head hurt too much).

2)There really seems to be no good research on this. One has to wonder why something as fundamental as "why am I not effectively getting to 50% of my possible audience" is not of burning interest to publishers, and not vitally important to the government of any forward-looking society (after all, the social and intellectual capital of any society rests on literacy, and on the literate having a catholic reading habit). Ignorance might keep you in power, but it also means you are in power over a financially weak and socially frail society.

So: what do you think? Is this bunkum, and reading is really distributed normally with the probability of those with an IQ of over 100 being more or less equal?

Is it Okay that men (or pick any other group) read less?

Is this about the money editors earn (Laura Miller's Pink Ghetto theory), or are there other forces at work? Given my own experience - being a writer is mostly terribly badly paid, with most editors living a secure, comfortable life compared to that, and that I would be livid if anyone said that should be any group's preserve, and it isn't. Or that some of the worst paying jobs in the qualified world are in field biology - as bad or worse than writing and far worse than editing (gee, my first direction before blundering into writing - do I detect a trend here?) and it's a very male dominated area (principally I think because it's dirty, physically hard, and badly paid. You really have to love it do do it. There are more women involved now... and oddly pay scales have improved along with that - so rather than getting worse because women are there, its getting better. Which is a good thing.) I can't say I believe pay can be the sole reason. It was a male dominated field once. I suspect careful analysis will show editors then were as screwed as they are now, relative to margins etc. So what other factors could be at work in the editorial gender imbalance? Is there one? Does it matter?

Doesn't diversity proportionate to your target audience make some kind sense - especially when diversity means getting the viewpoint of 50% of the possible audience? If I owned a publishing house aiming at generally accessible fiction it would make financial sense to me to not recruit an editorial board from same gender/ town/ orientation/color as I am. If I had little choice I'd aim for where my market was, surely? Ergo, if I were gay and Japanese, and wanted to only sell books to a gay Japanese market, it would make sense that my staff were gay and Japanese (or at least familiar with that group and culture). If I were trying to sell books to a more general audience, I'd want an editorial staff who at least knew a lot about other sectors, even if they did not have a physical representivity. New York is a very large city, (but still a tiny segment of the US, let alone English readers) but as a statistician the subsection its editors seem come from /live in is not. Is this part of the problem - like Hollywood assuming the world is just like Hollywood?

Leaving the occasional stupid sexist diatribes out (men are not too easily distracted by TV/video games, any more than women's brains explode if they try to read) are there any real concrete reasons why men could be reading less? (I can't say the gender of the writer is big issue with me, but the publishing date is!)

More questions than answers. Is this real, if so what should writers, readers and editors do about it?

Let the riot begin.

Curiosity

Happy Mother's Day!

We've talked some in earlier posts about what we look for in a bookstore, and what we wish wasn't in a bookstore. So here's a new question for you guys. What do you look for in an e-book store or e-book publisher? What would make you visit the site of an e-book publisher or store you've never been to before?

Why, you might ask, do I want to know? It's really quite simple. With each day that passes, more and more people are being published electronically. The majority still come from "legitimate" publishers, be they traditional publishers who also publish electronically or publishers who are exclusively electronic. But with the emergence of Amazon's electronic publishing options for writers who do not have a "publisher", Smashwords, and other similar sites, more and more authors are making their material available for download. Are you willing to try a new author in electronic format if they don't come from a "real" publisher?

When I purchase a book from an author I've never read before, it is almost always in hard copy. I've been enticed by cover art or quotes or the synopsis on the back of the cover. What I've seen from a number of self-published e-books is the lack of professional looking cover art and, even worse in my mind, no cover blurb or plot synopsis.

So, I guess what I'm interested in knowing from the rest of you is why do you pick up a new book in dead tree versions. Do you use the same criteria for choosing an e-book?

Ryk Spoor's Road to Publication

*Ladies and gentlemen, aliens and dragons, please extend a warm Mad Genius Club welcome to Ryk Spoor.*


Authors get asked lots of questions.

Undoubtedly some of the most common (besides "when's the next book out" if you're writing a series) are "where do you get your ideas", "Why do you write", and "how did you get published" (sometimes phrased as "how did you become a writer").

I'll answer the last question first, because it's undoubtedly the most interesting of the answers.

Waaaaay back in the misty reaches of time (okay, in 2000), Baen Books was preparing to do a re-issuing of the works of James Schmitz, with Eric Flint doing the editing to bring all the stories together, sort them into priority for republishing, and connect them into coherent wholes.

At the time, I was only vaguely aware of Baen Books (mainly because I generally paid little attention to publishers per se).

I was (and still am) a fixture on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written (having been present since around 1989).

Baen, of course, had recently begun their experiment of creating their own online community, Baen's Bar, and Eric Flint had his own conference on that community.

It is important to understand at this point that James Schmitz was (and is) one of my favorite of the old-time SF writers, someone who started out writing material that bordered on Doc Smith pastiche but quickly developed his own voice, and a voice that -- for his era -- was almost unique, especially in that most of his stories focused on competent, quick-thinking FEMALE characters who were fully as competent as any of the men around them, and showed few of the failings common to other authors' attempts at such characters.

His most famous novel work is undoubtedly The Witches of Karres, but in some ways I consider the Telzey Amberdon novels to be more representative, and his stories featuring Nile Etland -- especially The Demon Breed -- are some of his best work.Someone -- I do not recall who -- posted an excerpt of discussion from Flint's conference on what was being done on the Schmitz re-issue to rec.arts.sf.written.

Unfortunately -- or fortunately -- this excerpt was taken completely out of context, said context being that it was a discussion on Eric's conference between him and those who knew him and understood his discussion habits and tactics.

Taken thus out of context, it made it sound like Eric Flint: 

1.Intended to completely modernize the text, removing "outdated" references Felt Schmitz didn't understand how to properly tell a story
2.Was going to re-edit and possibly even re-write pieces of the stories to make them "better".

I took strong exception to this; in my view, even if the interpretation of that excerpt was exaggerated, the entire concept of "editing" a dead man's work made no sense at all. If you were going to re-issue it, well, RE-ISSUE! Take an old copy of the book, transfer those words, typeset and print. You don't need an editor for that!

Well, this ignited a flamewar the likes of which was rarely seen even on that newsgroup -- which had certainly seen many.

Several separate message threads were created, with over 2,000 posts, with Eric and I shooting back and forth at each other while others took various sides and added their own volleys of fire.

However, even at the height of this flamewar, neither Eric nor I focused on insulting the other PERSON, just their choices or viewpoints, and when one of us DID make an actual error (which both of us did at least once during the debate), we admitted it to the other person and corrected ourselves.

This was a somewhat rare occurrence and caused both of us to recognize that the other guy might be obviously wrongheaded, but sincerely and honestly so.

The flamewar continued in spurts for so long that the first book in the reissue actually hit the shelves while it continued. It was at that point that Eric said to me, paraphrased, "why the hell are you still arguing about what you THINK I said about what I might do to the book, instead of just picking up the book and READING it?"

To which I replied "Because I'm not sure I want to spend money on something I'm not sure I even WANT!"

To which HE answered: ".... that's a good point."At which point, he quickly asked Jim Baen for permission and then proceeded to send me the original files -- with his edits, and commentary on what he'd done, and why, so I could see what did and didn't change, why it had to be changed (in Eric's view) and so on.

To which my response was: "Well, dammit, now you've gone all REASONABLE on me! Now I'm going to actually have to read it and give an INFORMED opinion!"And after reading the original and final versions and Eric's notes, I posted my opinion, which boiled down to: most of the edits were trivial things -- changing punctuation which was not needed, etc.

A few were substantiative, of which two I felt actively damaged the stories in question, and one was a stroke of genius which I was surprised had been missed out on by both John Campbell and Schmitz himself. "But overall these are 95%+ original Schmitz, excellent stories, and well worth owning. If you don't already own them, go out and buy these. It's well worth it."After that, Eric used me for a while as his "loyal opposition" -- sending me copies of other re-issues underway so that I could be there as a sort of third-party reviewer.

During one exchange of conversation, he happened to ask where I lived, to which I replied "East Greenbush, NY" and he said, "No kidding. My mother in law's in Schenectady."

So the next time he came up to this area, he dropped by to visit. And while we were talking, my wife brought up the fact that I wrote (something I would not have done in that context). In Eric's words: "So naturally I had to ask if he had anything finished, and this is where Spoor showed how clever he was, by telling me that all he had was some kind of vampire story. Now, normally I consider anything involving vampires about as interesting as watching paint dry, but Spoor knew my contrary nature would make it so that I'd feel obligated to REALLY give his story a fair try."

Eventually Eric got a chance to read the three connected stories I'd given him, and one day I got a phone call.

Since Eric had NEVER called me previously (except to verify directions to my house) I figured this meant he was trying the personal touch to let me down easy. Instead he said, "This is eminently publishable stuff. There's just one thing wrong with it: it's too short."

He gave the stories to Jim Baen, who agreed with him, and I then bashed out another 60,000 words in about 2 months to add to the first three, tweaked those a little bit, and about a year later I held in my hands my first copy of Digital Knight, which was dedicated in part to The Butcher of Baen, Eric Flint.

Also in Eric's words, and mine: I do not recommend anyone else attempt this route to publication.

There are so many ways this could go wrong.To address the other two questions:I get my ideas from many sources; I read literally thousands of books when I was younger, and there's nothing so convenient as taking a piece of A.E. Van Vogt, connecting it to something from Robert E. Howard, and setting it in a universe Heinlein might have worked on.

I'm inspired by anime I watch, by images -- one entire novel I recently wrote was triggered simply because I happened to see an absolutely magnificent rainbow one day, while driving home -- and by music.

The largest single source for me, though, and the most powerful tool I have to help me with working out my ideas, is roleplaying. I run RPG campaigns and throw pieces of my concepts into the grinder of the player characters, let them gnaw on them, bash them around, and see how well they survive!

As to WHY I write... partly because I can't NOT write. I started writing when I was 6. I have stories that want to be told, and I tell them. But I also write because there's stories I want to read, and no one else writes them.

If there is any actual PURPOSE to what I write, then it is to bring forth the Sense of Wonder, that thrill that widened my eyes and inspired me to dream when I was 11 and first read about the Lensmen and their galaxy-spanning conflict with the implacable forces of Boskone and the even more terrible powers lying behind them, the chill down my spine from first reading "One Ring to Rule Them All, One Ring to Find Them...", the triumph and glory that only words and imagination can evoke and that often seems absent from other fiction I have read. This is the REASON for fiction, to me, to exalt, to lift up the reader and make them see something better, grander, more glorious than anything they have seen... and to, at least for a moment, BELIEVE in it.

Ryk was born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ryk moved with his family to Vermilion, South Dakota, then Atlanta, Georgia, and to Latham, NY before ending up in Schenectady, NY. As an effort-induced asthmatic, he was often confined to the house and spent the majority of his time reading and, as time went on, writing (getting those first million words out of the way early!); while science books -- especially those on volcanology -- were a large part of his reading, the Oz novels by L. Frank Baum were his favorites in early life.

In junior high, a teacher gave him a battered, slightly scorched old copy of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Second-Stage Lensmen, which pegged his sense-of-wonder meter permanently and set him on an inevitably geeky quest to become a science fiction writer. In high school he discovered computers and RPGs, and ran the very first play-by-email (PBEM) roleplaying campaign in 1977-1980; it was during this time he first began using the online alias of "Sea Wasp" which he uses to this day.

Since then he acquired degrees in mathematics and science, psychology, and information science, worked everywhere from fast-food joints to an internet-bubble filesharing company to Borders Books, and now works as the R&D Coordinator for International Electronic Machines. Along the way he became a Usenet fixture, a RPG consultant and writer, an anime fan, and eventually achieved his ambition to be an SF writer when Baen Books published his first novel, Digital Knight. Since then, he has also published the short novel Diamonds Are Forever as a part of the anthology Mountain Magic, Boundary (the latter two with Eric Flint), and his latest solo novel, Grand Central Arena, which is a modern space opera intended as a salute and tribute to "Doc" Smith and the other Golden Age writers; a sequel to Boundary, Threshold, is due out at the end of May.

Ryk E. Spoor now lives in Troy, NY, with his wife Kathleen and four children (Chris, Gabriel, Victoria, and Domenica), and one small poodle.