When the Dam Breaks

After all the talk about searching for inspiration, I thought it might be fun to talk about the other end of the spectrum. When the dam breaks, and you are completely overwhelmed with ideas, with energy, with a compulsive desire to create.


I think for a lot of artists, work tends to happen in a cycle. A dry period after the completion of one work when the artist is drained and exhausted - particularly if you have done the work by burning the candle at both ends. Then the miserable period of getting yourself up off the floor again - when it feels like you will never be inspired again, ever.


But the dam does break.


It's because artists regard this frenzied period of work as the normal state that it is usually glossed over. People rarely talk about this active creative phase - for one thing they are busy doing it (and don't have time for a blog whinge - Facebook is the exception) and because they often feel perfectly happy to work in isolation without crowing about it. (Mind you nothing gripes me more than hearing on Facebook about how writer X has done 10,000 words today when I can't open the laptop).


South-east Queensland is experiencing one of the wettest periods in half a century. All the dams (which were bone dry 18 months ago), are literally full to bursting. They are so full that water is being released, even though - in combination with the Brisbane river tide - this is expected to cause flooding in Brisbane. The city and region around it has already experienced significant flooding, with scores of swollen creeks blocking roads, cars abandoned at crossings, mud slides, abandoned homes. The wettest period since the lead up to the infamous 1974 flooding - and it's not even the wet season yet!


The picture is of Somerset Dam, which is one of the dams releasing water at the moment.


Back to the main theme: It's a good idea to do some planning for when the dam breaks. Depending on your situation, it might be worth being ready to negotiate some extra 'alone-time' with the family, perhaps book a room at Sarah's favourite hotel, or perhaps take time off work (if your work is flexible that way).


Having been brought up by harsh parents who were extremely black and white, I tend to think I can go about things like a robot - doing the same amount of work no matter how I feel. That's handy when breaking through a hesitation to write (I don't believe in writer's block), but it has the downside that I don't recognise my own natural patterns. Creativity and 'lumpish' work flow go hand-in-hand.


So how do you prepare for the flood? Do you have a garret ready for when the Muse strikes?

Research Matters

Oh, yes it does, even - or perhaps especially - if you're writing something involving worlds, pasts and futures that never actually existed. You see, Dave's post and the discussion about it afterwards is only part of the battle. If your story is set in Paris, then given a general time period, most people already have a handy-dandy little mental picture we can use to hang the story from. Granted, the little mental picture might come from a Disney cartoon, but it's enough to give the illusion of a sense of place. In the same way, American Civil War immediately brings to mind the handy-dandy mental picture of Scarlett O'Hara dresses and gentlemen fighting for honor, and oppressed slaves (hopefully not all in the Scarlett O'Hara dresses).

If you're writing SF or Fantasy, you can use key words to evoke the handy-dandy little mental picture: to most people the word "spaceship" gets a picture that probably blends the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, the flying saucer, and a few other odds and sods - unless you describe it first. "Uniform" in this context is almost certainly going to be tight-fitting, and "body armor" something like Storm Troopers, or like one of the assorted SF anime series.

On the fantasy side, "elf" is enough to bring the Lord of the Rings movies to mind. For that matter, unless you explicitly state otherwise, most people are likely to assume quasi-medieval cartoony European rural.

So where is research in all this?

Start by reading Sir PTerry. Now consider that everything in the Discworld starts somewhere in Earth's history and mythology. Yep. All of it - although I really do not want to know where the inspiration for the World's Best Dad mugs in the Exquisition's torture chambers came from. It's not just the weird and occasionally horrible trivia, either: take a stroll through pretty much anything from Wyrd Sisters on, and you'll find all sorts of world views beautifully integrated into the book.

And that, more than fact, is the gold writers need to be chasing.

I'm pretty sure that's not something anyone else is telling you. It's either some kind of mushy "all cultures are equal" - which isn't true, because they're patently not the same, and other people are very much not just like us with interesting food and costumes - or you're getting "write what you know" with the subtext that if you don't belong to the group in question you can't possibly write about it, insulting everyone with an imagination in the process... Anyway, what research can give you is the accounts of people who belong to cultures that resemble your imagined one to some extent - and which reveal the mindset and worldview of those people.

Say you're writing an Asian-themed fantasy, and you want a world that echoes Imperial China of the Han Dynasty. You go looking (Google is your friend) for translations of documents written in that era. Anything you can find is helpful, although if you can find responses to stressful events it's even better. Eyewitness accounts of this disaster or that war compared with a more or less impartial history of the same era can reveal all sorts of things - something Sir PTerry played on with his usual skill in Interesting Times, with Twoflower's incredulous reaction to ordinary people telling soldiers to (more or less) bugger off and the soldiers not retaliating. The urinating dog pictogram is a cleverly placed gag to soften the impact of the real message. I could go on forever about how well Sir PTerry does this, but instead I'm going to focus on a real example, one that's a little closer in time and space (and identities have been munged with to protect the guilty).

Someone I know is in the middle of a rather ugly falling out with her family over a whole lot of things that look petty and silly from the outside. From her side, though, there's a very different filter. As she sees things, she's being treated like a child and expected to do and be what everyone else in her family thinks she should do and be. She sees a pattern of put-downs and insults, and that she's only defending herself. A good writer should be able to tell her story and make her sympathetic to readers who would normally think her actions were petty, malicious, and immature. A good writer should be able to do this even when said writer thinks those actions are petty, malicious, and immature.

Which - of course - is where the research comes in. If you can find enough information about how people in Culture X thought and felt about Situation Y, you can put yourself inside their heads and think they way they did, at least for a little while. From such a source comes Pooh-Bah's much prized artistic verisimilitude and spares you the horror of writing what ultimately proves to be a "bald and unconvincing narrative"

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take any document (yes, anything you can find on Google counts, and yes, it can be a news article. It just has to be a document. No video or audio, please) and try to figure out what that document reveals about the writer's world view. You don't even need to post back what you've found, although I'm sure it will be interesting if you do. Oh, and no using this as an excuse to slam someone for not agreeing with your beliefs. You're supposed to be trying to empathize here.

The Pen And The Tuning Fork

At one time at a MileHi con (in Denver) Connie Willis said something that has haunted me ever since. And probably not in the way she meant it to haunt people. She was talking about shameless self-promoters – I think Diana Wynne Jones called them “God or Shakespeare” in Deep Secret – and said that they had to know what they said wasn’t true because in the dark of night, in the solitude of our own souls, we knew exactly how good or bad we were.

Since then I’ve been praying she’s wrong, because in the dark of night, or the light of day about the most confident I ever get about my books is “they might, possibly, perhaps be pretty good.”

Mind you, ten years after writing a book – which is about the soonest I can stand to open it – I’ve been known to open it and go “Oh, wow, I wrote this?” And there was of course the experience of hitting my head and getting a last minute request for a couple of short stories while recovering. The resulting stories were news to me when I got the contributor’s copy and other than one factual mistake on guns (which I might have made while I was well, writing under pressure) I can say they are pretty good stories. I can say so because I don’t remember writing them.

However, we can’t go on hitting our heads all the time – at least I hope not – so how can we tell when our stories are good? How can we tell we’ve hit what we’re aiming for?

I bring you bad tidings. I think Connie Willis was wrong. You can’t. And I can’t. At least, in the secret recesses of the night, no angel has ever come down (or up) to tell me the true worth of my life’s work.

If you’re doing any art (yes, I’m cringing, since really, I’d prefer to be considered a master craftswoman) properly, you’re wrapping so much of yourself in it that you cannot step back and see it objectively – unless you wait ten years or so. (It’s sort of like seeing your home objectively. At least I can’t. It’s only when I’ve been away for a month or so, that I can come back and go “this kitchen needs SOMETHING on that wall.”)

Oh, there are circumstances under which you have some idea that what you’ve written is a step up or a new technique for you. This is usually while you’re learning it. You can feel yourself straining to weave it in. This happened to me (still does somewhat) for years and years as I struggled with plot. Or as I tried to weave in background fleshing with action.

These were techniques I’d realized I needed while reading other books (that’s one way to tell what you’re missing, though not necessarily the relative worth of what you have) and which I’d studied and applied, consciously. (I think this accounts for new artists/writers thinking their stuff is great. It’s the “wow, I can’t believe I can do this at all.)

There is only one problem with that. Once you master a technique, it becomes part of you. And then you don’t notice you’re doing it – until ten years later. Or until you go back and try to analyze your book (though this is an imperfect and difficult ability.) Or – and this is important – until someone tells you that you managed it – particularly if they didn’t know what you were trying for.

And here we hit upon the only “tuning fork” you can use to evaluate your work. The eyes of others.

The problem is that others are not objective, just as you aren’t. When selecting first readers, you must take the following into account: their feelings towards you; their feelings towards your writing (if your mom hates the idea of your writing, she’s not going to be objective); their experience with the field/reading in general; their ATTITUDE towards what you’re writing, in general (for instance, it would be foolhardy to give my boys erotic romance to read. Not that I’ve ever written that.)

Two general guidelines – if someone always tells you he loves your writing, he might make a great spouse (probably not. It would be very bad for your character) but he is not good first readers. And if someone always tells you he hates your writing, it’s just the same thing (only please, don’t marry him.)

If you don’t have time to carefully vet one first reader, get ten volunteers. If all of them point to the same problem, you probably have it. If three of them point to the same problem, there’s a good chance you have it. Most of the time you’ll find they don’t agree, but when they do it’s time to pay attention. (And by problem I don’t mean typos. We all make typos, and you’ll usually have only one or two readers who find them – out of any group. I mean problems in characterization, action, world building, dialogue, etc. The difficult stuff.)

This doesn’t mean you know how to revise – remember my article on that? – but it means you can read books with an eye to stealing techniques and know how to do it right next time.

So – who is your first reader? Do you have first readers? How many? What has your experience been like? And do you know exactly how good or bad a writer you are – in the middle of the night? (It’s entirely possible I’m odd. It wouldn’t be the first time.)

UPDATE Tangentially related and something I can't speak to but the author of this post can:

http://www.kjablog.com./

Breaking the Genre Mould

After reading Dave's post about people not knowing the tropes before they start writing in a genre, it occurred to me that speculative fiction is a rather arcane genre, with many sub-genres.

I was at a convention over the weekend and someone asked me to define fantasy. I said, 'James Bond is a fantasy' and they all fell about laughing. LOL, because it is. In fact, when it was written it was near future SF and now it is retro SF.

So here we have Firefly - which is cowboys in space. And we have Star Wars which is fantasy in space, just swap the swords with the light sabres.

Once it was science fiction, fantasy and horror, and there was a whole sub-genre of romance that dealt with fantasy-romance, futuristic-romance and paranormal-romance. Then paranormal-romance escaped the confines of its sub-genre and became Dark Urban Fantasy (I know DUFs don't offer closure for the romance arc with every book), but they do have lashings more sensuality than the urban fantasies that came before them. And there's steampunk, a whole movement in itself. I must admit I really like the costumes. Simply spiffy. It's a pity we don't dress like that every day.

Now we have genres being twisted and inter-woven so as to challenge definition. Think of Simon Green's Nightside series. (I really enjoy these books). The series is horror and dark urban fantasy but his world also includes science fiction tropes.

Have we reached a point where your average reader isn't too worried about the divide between the genres? I read across a variety of genres. and like to find books that challenge and stretch the genres.

Have you discovered any authors who manage to take a genre and give it a surprising new twist? Does it worry you, if the genres are inter-woven?

Just a conventional thing.

"Squids in Space" or "talking cabbages".

Yes that's sf, according to the public pronouncements of one of the darlings of the literary world -- who often writes what one could - to avoid argument - call speculative fiction set in an imaginary future. Absolutely not 'Science Fiction', which could never fit those parameters. Not exactly plausible or containing much that could be called great science, but definitely without a hint of extraterrestrial cephlopod (which of course obligatorily occurs in all 'Science Fiction', except for those books that have talking cabbages. Or both). (I can actually only think of two 'squid in space' books - one which I will avoid naming 'cause I didn't like it much, and the other, Mother of Demons, certainly better constructed, better science and with a very sociological slant - better than anything I've read out of modern literature for some time. And yes, I do read some. I learn. I try to harvest from other genres. There is something of value in all of them.) On deep thought, there is something of a pervasive note of used brassica about the non-cephalopod stuff - I am not sure if those noises were 'speech', per se... ah well. Anyway: What brought this to mind was a lady participating in a writer's group I belong to. Now she's intelligent, she has an attractive natural voice to her writing, a chatty, personal style. She has a good story to tell.

Short sections of the book she's trying to work on read very well.

But go beyond the 1-2 paragraph limit and you become hopelessly confused and eye-glaze.

The reason for this came out in about the first thirty seconds of conversation. "I don't actually read much."

On following this up it turned out that she'd read occassional magazines since leaving school, which was probably the last time she'd actually read an entire book. And those were not things she'd found entertaining. Now I'm an appalling teacher, as I am still learning myself. But I absorb a little by imitation of good examples, which is why I try to read something of everything, and work out just what the author is doing. This dear lady had her experience of magazines (ergo some good paragraphs) and high-school English essay-writing to go on.
She has, in other words, no idea of the conventions which have evolved from generations of the art of writing a story so that audiences 1)follow it. 2)enjoy it.
Now, all these are not 'rules' - they get broken and books still sell, still are loved. On rare occassions not knowing them may result in something fresh and new. But generally these conventions (and they vary from genre to genre) exist for one simple reason - to make the reading experience better and faster for readers.
For a simple example: if you are writing third person there are conventions governing the point of veiw. You can only write from one point of veiw (know what is going on in one character's head) at a time, without a clear and distinct 'hand over'. So my wannabe, not knowing this, had 4 points of veiw, within the protagonist's own head - which were not divided in any obvious way, and several other walk in characters, all talking, and all telling us (the reader) what they thought when they said that. The dialogue was good... the result... I had no idea just what went on there. So to make up an example:

"Jane you're being a fool," she reasoned.
"I have to be." There was no give that attitude.
"She could be right," I tried to mediate with them.
Fred put his head around the door to speak to me. "Time to go," he said. He thought Jane was flipping out...
Henry was sitting in the truck in a really bad mood, thinking about his wife in Pennsylvania. He grunted at Fred and Jane.


This is a simplified version of what I am talking about, which sounded like five people, but was actually three. And as more and more characters arrived and each spoke as the point of veiw character, I became hopelessly utterly lost. If I'd bought the book, I'd have been mad and TBAR -ed it. What? Oh TBAR. 'Throw book across room.' It's something 'everyone' knows... a convention on the meaning.

The author needed to have the POV (Point of Veiw) convention explained to her. The purpose of those three *** or blank line had just not registered back at school. Once it was shown to her (in one of those things she'd not read much of, called a 'novel' which was intended to be read for pleasure) the section improved vastly.
She's a quick learner, and will get there, but it makes thing very hard for her.

The trouble is, that's only the start. I don't actually think anyone has codified the conventions ('cause they are not rules) that help to make reading easier and more pleasant and effortless. They change and evolve, but readers learn to read comfortably within them. For this reason you have to learn them the hard way, by reading and absorbing. By learning that no, instrospection mid-action will not work.

The same thing, of course, occurs at a genre level. It helps to make books flow, and it helps to make the subtext far, far deeper, because you work on the basis of common knowledge and don't have to repeat that. 'Everyone' - well, everyone who reads sf, knows what FTL travel is, and what implies. Everyone knows the 'laws of robotics'. Everyone knows what a Waldo is. What a tractor is. And that is barely the start of our list of shared terms and background that form the conventions of sf.

If you've ever bothered to read HG Wells or Jules Verne... even aside from the dated language, you'll soon realise just how clunky sf without the conventions is. Of course for the non-sf reader without the shared background, it might make more sense. If you want modern versions of the same but without quite the skill or story-telling, try cephlopod free stuff. The cabbage stench is your imagination. And that is what you get for not reading in the genre you're trying to write in. Perhaps as an outsider, you'd learn just what needs to be explained so that newcomers can enjoy the books, and the established audience don't think you're an incompetant idiot.

So that was my bag for tonight. If you're writing for an audience used to reading, you need to write in ways which they accept and understand - or at least not stretch them too far too fast.
What are the conventions of writing novels (so they are easily followed, and entertaining) that you have picked up on? I've offered a couple of mine.

And what is it about sf that sets it apart: what are the things we assume are common knowledge? FTL, Waldos, the three laws of robotics, tractors... what others? And am I right in assuming that 'everyone' knows what they are, and probably where they came from.

Oh and can anyone think of a talking cabbage book? The best I could think of were the Kanten in Brin's Uplift books, which are more like talking broccolli

Inspiration

This is what every writer, every artist, everyone who create in one form or fashion seeks. To some, inspiration comes easily. They find it in the sights and sounds surrounding them. Random snippets of conversation, the smell of freshly baking bread, a memory brings the muse singing to them. To others -- and all too often of late this has been me -- it is a fleeting thing, something that teases us but never quite delivers.

I was talking to Sarah about this the other evening. Actually, I was whining about it because my tinfoil hat seems to be preventing the ideas from coming where hers actually seems to incubate them. She listened for a few minutes and then verbally slapped me -- as she should have -- and told me to go to the dictionary, pick out four words, throw one out and then write a story using those three words. Oh yeah, the words had to be picked at random. So I couldn't get away with using "a", "and" and "the". Have I told you she was evil?

The other thing she told me to try was to go to a collection of Kipling, or any other poet, and scan the titles. Choose one and then adapt it to my own words and go from there. Well, let's just say my heels dug in at that. Before she could come up with any other helpful suggestions, I took refuge in the fact I had to get ready for the house to be invaded by a bunch of college kids in town for the football game. Whew.

Or so I thought until dinner last night. Mom, my son, one of his buddies from college and I were sitting around the table talking when Mom brought up the fact she wanted to go to the Dallas Holocaust Museum. There'd been a wonderful story about it in the Dallas Morning News that morning. The odd thing about it was the fact that my son and I had been talking about visiting the museum when he's home for winter break. Of course, when you start talking about World War II with my mom who lived through it, my son and his buddy who have already signed their commitments to the military (or, in the buddy's case, is about to) and me, well, it becomes a long conversation that branches off into military history, etc.

Any way, as we talked, a niggling of an idea, not quite inspiration hit. It germinated all night and then sent me looking at images this morning. And that's when it struck me, and when it reminded me of Chris' post a week ago. I'm visual and there are certain sights that to send my imagination not just traipsing comfortably down the path of inspiration, but running wild.

Who can fail to be moved by the sight of a pile of shoes as high, or higher, than they are tall? Who did the shoes belong to? What's the story of the little girl who once wore the Mary Janes, or the boy who wore the scuffed and scored brown leather shoes. Did they survive the camps and did their families? We've all heard of, if not read, Anne Frank's Diary. But what about all the men and women, boys and girls, represented by these shoes? More importantly, if I were to write a story using this sort of image as inspiration, could I do justice to the memory of all those represented here, even if I might be writing a romance or a sf/f piece?

This is an image that has haunted me from the day I first saw it. I had the pleasure of being in Washington D.C. not long after the Korean War Memorial was opened. The sight of these life sized statues trudging through the rice paddy in the day was haunting. At night, well, it's something I'll never forget. The artists involved in making the statues managed to capture not only the pride and determination of these men, young and not so young, but also the exhaustion, the pain and the despair a soldier feels after being in the field for so long. This one statue in particular remained with me, simply because of the expression on his face. I can read so much there and, yes, it will be incorporated into the story I'm now being battered about the head and shoulders with.

But it's not only the tragic or the battle-weary that inspires me. It's also the majestic and whimsical. The Summer Palace outside of St. Petersburg, Russia is one such place. It represents not only some of the most beautiful architecture I've ever seen, both inside and out, but also a sense of whimsy. If you walk the grounds, there are areas where you have to watch your step because if you happen to step on the wrong colored rock, you'll get soaked by hidden fountains. Just imagine the courtesans with their fancy clothes and attitudes walking oh so properly only to have the tsar's sense of humor douse them -- especially since their companions who weren't soaked would be having the laugh of their lives. The palace and its grounds also have a rich history from WWII, but that's for another day.

So, how about you? Where do you draw inspiration from when you find yourself reaching for an idea and it just isn't there? Or what about these photos? Do you get anything from them or from their stories?

The Ebook and The Author

Ladies, Gentlemen, Dragons and Aliens, give a warm Mad Genius Club Welcome to Jacqueline Lichtenberg, an author who needs no introduction from me and who, this morning, writes about one of our most pressing concerns: ebooks and how they're changing the field.
Without further ado, I'll get out of the way of a much better writer than myself.



Sounds like a bad joke, and it just very well may be one.

Writers are finding the very foundations swept out from under them as publishers collapse. Publishers are collapsing because distributors are collapsing.

The entire entertainment industry is being hit by a hurricane.

This post will be a collection of links describing what writers are facing followed by a solution some of the geniuses among the professional writers have come up with.

First - what writers used to make off writing.

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2010/09/13/writing-nowadays-what-writing-pays/

Part of the reason for the falling profitability of any given title is that "readers" (or potential readers) have so many choices of what to do with an hour in the evening -- or with $10. 200 TV channels instead of 3 and a few Radio stations if you can make them come in without static. 12 screen movie theaters, now a lot with 3-D. Netflix by mail or online -- even on your living room TV which is now almost the size of the wall. And then there's fanfic posted online for free reading - often better than anything professionally published.

Who'd read a book with all this yanking at the attention?

Well, a person who used to read 1 book a week will now read maybe 2 books a year, and they'll likely be TV spinoffs or non-fiction with stuff they need to know.

Second - read up on copyright law as it is evolving before our eyes.

Now, writers with really bad old contracts will be able to retrieve their rights and put their books up on Kindle etc.

http://www.copylaw.org/p/termination-of-book-music-publishing_17.html

Meanwhile, there's a huge socio-philosophical argument going on that copyright is no right at all, but actually EVIL. And counterpoint to that is the development of the electronic world which is now making "intellectual property" worthless.

Third - Read this blog entry about an article in Wired Magazine which you may not have the patience to get through. But read about the Wired Magazine article here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html

The business model of publishing has changed. Is changing. Because the market for fiction is morphing beyond recognition.

But storytelling is still a triumphant artform with much of value to add to the lives of those who imbibe fiction.

It's just that today it's graphic novels, and films, YouTube Video shorts, music videos, and anything with pictures.

So writers are flailing about looking for another way to access markets.

Fourth - read this article about a new way to market writing, fiction and non-fiction alike.

http://sacramentobookreview.com/viewpoints-weekly-columns/9-2-10-scribd-pros-cons-for-scribes-and-buyers-alike/

And this from Yahoo News
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Entrepreneur-finds-audience-apf-3534702898.html?x=0

Why are creators of fiction seeking markets so desperately? Because everything has shifted hard and fast -- derailing careers and making some skills obsolete while others are demanded. And it takes a genius level person to be able to acquire those new skills after decades perfecting antithetical skills.

Here is a website that tracks the state of the ebook -- it tracks WHOLESALE sales (in dollars) of ebooks, profites garnered by big publishers.

http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm

Now the problem with that parabolic arc of increase is the OLD book contracts signed by most authors.

That's why the copyright law link I gave above is relevant.

Yet, when you get your rights back, what do you DO??

You still have new books coming out, and fans want the prior books.

Writers are having fits. Agents are having fits. Why? Because though ebooks are cheap to distribute and have no warehousing, the AUTHOR gets a very small (unfairly small) percentage of what the publisher makes off the Kindle or other ebook.

Kindle is telling you that publishers have to charge large amounts for current titles as they come out because the authors get a lot.

But the authors are telling me they don't.

A whole bunch of Science Fiction (and other genre) authors on facebook have been muttering privately to each other for some time.

Several of these geniuses came up with the same solution at the same time, including living lights such as Norman Spinrad.

http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/

Kindle decided to let authors put up their own backlist and take the profit. Kindle's first deal with 35% to the author on each sale. Recently, they upped that to 70% to the author.

Buy a Kindle edition an author has put up themselves and thereby thank them for their dedication to entertaining you.

However, when you go onto Kindle's lists and searches it's very hard to tell the beginning writer who's self-publishing without benefit of professional editing, without understanding marketing, from the professional writer making a well-edited novel that's been specifically crafted for a certain market (you).

Now, however, facebook's muttering authors have muttered together to produce a solution to your problem as a reader.

On smashwords.com or kindle -- various other sources -- you can find the ebook version to replace early entries in a series you love that you lost in a flood, fire, move or to nosey in-laws.

And here is an index that is being developed by writers for readers to help you find where your favorite writers have made backlist titles available.

Here's a blog entry introducing the project:

http://www.doranna.net/wordplay/index.php/2010/09/15/behind-the-scenes-backlist-ebooks/

And here's where you can find the list of authors on facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1270625545871&sk=messages#!/BacklistEbooks?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts

And you can see comments from those authors if you click the WALL tab above.

Maybe that page isn't available to you if you're not on facebook.

The group is planning to launch a domain which will host these pages to the public and make them more informative and interactive. The authors will pay a fee to cover the expense of creating and hosting that domain, but you will have a handy way to sift the welter of new titles and find books you may not have heard of (because the bookstore chains keep books on the shelf for maybe 2 or 3 weeks now -- it used to be about 6 for a long-lived book).

You can fill in your collection and then venture into the new authors' self-published offerings with more confidence.

Here's the way Doranna Durgin, one of the founding forces behind "Backlist Ebooks" explains what they're doing:

--------
"Backlist Ebooks is a brand new venture designed to help ebook readers find
quality fiction from established authors who have e-released their out-of-print novels. Participating authors must have self-published one or more backlist titles that were originally published traditionally, in print, by a major professional publishing house." The FaceBook page offers author listings by genre, and author contact information; soon (October) we'll have an interim website up at backlistebooks.com, and are developing toward a site that will present individual books to make it easy for readers to find what they're looking for.

I can tell you that our listed mystery authors have been among the first responders to this new project, really on top of the whole idea and interested in connecting to readers in this way--we definitely look forward to adding more!
-------

So there's the tale of the Ebook and the Author. It starts out pretty sad, but ends up with the Author having the last laugh, don't you think?

Oh, and you will find me on that Backlist Ebook facebook page. I have several titles on Kindle, (the Romantic Times Award Winning Dushau and its 2 sequels, Farfetch and Outreach, plus an omnibus edition of the two novels, Hero and Border Dispute, and more to come. I also have ebook versions of Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends in Trade Paperback and Ebook from Wildside Press.

You can usually find them all and more on this Amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_13?url=search-alias=digital-text&field-keywords=jacqueline+lichtenberg&sprefix=Jacqueline+Li

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (free chapters of currently available books)
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ full bio-biblio and more free reading
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com where I post on Tuesdays
http://facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg -- here I post exclusively on writing, publishing and the film industry

(Edited to fix links)