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Heh.  So, first, John Scalzi put up The Electronic Publishing Bingo Card:

For those of you unfamiliar with the “Bingo Card” concept, basically, if you see one or more of your favorite arguments for how ZOMG EPUBBING WILL CHANGE THE WORLD FOR EVAR on the bingo card, you can be assured that your argument is not, in fact, anywhere as good (or original) as you might think it is. You might wish to cultivate new ones, or at least learn why your favorite argument isn’t always super-mega-ultra-convincing to those of us who have to think about this stuff as it regards our professional lives.

Which, I have to admit, is pretty funny, although pretty snarky and dismissive.

If you prefer to see your dismissive snark aimed in the other direction, Flickr user “shmuel510″ fired back with the Traditional Publishing Bingo Card.  That’s the kind of linkage you can expect from this blog, kids: Fair and Balanced.

This is — I don’t even have words for this.  ”Reprehensible” will do, for a start.  Brian Keene writes:

Starting in late 2009, Dorchester–Leisure began making late payments to some of their authors. Indeed, some authors report never having received payments at all, nor royalty statements verifying what, if any, monies were owed [....] As of August 9th (2010), they considered themselves “in bankruptcy but are not actually filing for bankruptcy”. Vendors and authors who were owed money for books or services from August 8th forward took precedence in being paid. All others would have to wait.

I was one of those authors. I had not been paid since late-2009. My marriage had fallen apart, my bills were piling up, and more than half of my annual income was perpetually “coming soon”. I decided to take a gamble [....] I said, “Forget about the rest of the money you owe me. Just give me my rights back.” It was a risky gamble, and I sought the council of some of the biggest veteran authors in the genre, but it was a gamble that ultimately paid off, because it allowed me to place my back list with a more solvent publisher. We signed the deal. Dorchester went their way. I went mine. And that should have been the end of the story.

Except that it wasn’t, because since then, Dorchester has repeatedly violated that agreement. Since January of this year, unauthorized digital editions of my work have been sold via Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and Sony. These digital editions were not made available for sale until well after the rights had reverted back to me. Dorchester’s response, in each case, has been to blame someone else and assure me that “they are looking into it” and that I would be “financially compensated” and that “it wouldn’t happen again”. Except that I haven’t been financially compensated and it keeps happening again.

— BOYCOTT DORCHESTER (with updates at bottom) – Brian Keene.

At this point, he’s got a hell of a list of writers, agents, booksellers, publishers, and other writing professionals backing him up on this.  Good.

…. God, I remember when Leisure Books first started putting out horror novels, I thought they seemed so cool and I really wanted to submit something to them.  Now I’m really glad I didn’t, and just remembering that I wanted to makes me want to go take a long, hot shower.

Remember a few posts back, when I wrote about writers and depression? Well, when I saw a post from Joe Konrath entitled “Depression and Writers”, I thought it was going to be along the same lines, talking about the phenomenon in general. But instead, he was talking about a very specific case. He shared with us a letter from a writer named Kiana Davenport, whose depression over her failing writing career was taking her as far as depression can take you:

“With dwindling publishers, rock-bottom advances, I didn’t see any reason to write anymore, which is what I LIVE for.

Unemployment is staggering here, I couldn’t find a job. I sold my good clothes and jewelry, made out a will leaving the land to my daughter. I felt I’d rather die than scrape and starve. (I’m a good swimmer, I’m half Hawaiian, I know how to swim to exhaustion, then unconsciousness.) If I couldn’t make a living at what I love to do – publishers and bookstores folding left and right – I felt I’d rather pack it in. I was dead serious, I’ve never been afraid to die. Its a Hawaiian thing – we always have one foot in the other world.

At first friends thought I was kidding, but then they saw me making plans, they watched me begin to withdraw. Then one day a friend came to my house and said two words. ‘JOE KONRATH.’ That’s what she said. ‘This man is going to save your life.’”

I was in tears by the time I was done reading this.  And it has a happy ending.  Kiana read through Konrath’s entire blog, read all his advice and research and hard numbers about self-publishing, and decided to try it.  Long story short — she’s happy writing again.

Joe waves away any notion that he, personally, saved this woman’s life — but it’s clear to me, his modesty aside, that his words and his ideas did exactly that.

I’ve struggled with thoughts of suicide my whole adult life. Sometimes they can come out of nowhere on a bright clear sunny day. I know the voices that tell you that you don’t have a single good thing left in the world. They’ve never been pulled so far deep that I actually started making serious plans, and I can’t even imagine what level of hell that would be to live through. But she did live through it. Another one stepped back from the edge. That’s one more, one more little miracle.

Her self-published collection is called House of Skin, and Konrath says: “Let’s see how low we can get her Amazon ranking. Right now it’s #134,555. I’d really like to see it crack the Top 1000.” Not a bad idea. The collection is just $1.99, and I think that’s a pretty small price to pay to let someone know they’re not alone.

I keep forgetting to mention this today, partly because I keep having trouble believing it happened:

I was out with friends last night at the AFK Tavern, which bills itself as “a place for Geeks and Gamers.”  Which, by the way?  Is brilliant. It’s a great, friendly, fun, welcoming space, and also the food was really good.

So I was sitting there, minding my own business, when someone who evidently works there slipped out of the back, crouched down to my eye level, and says, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to impose, but if I can go find it right now, would you be willing to sign our copy of Slices?”

Smoothly and suavely, in my own inimitable cool and collected manner, I nearly choked on my water and said, “Holy shit! Uhh, yes, yes of course!”  He thanked me and left.

I don’t know how this guy recognized me, as I didn’t recognize him. For a split-second I thought maybe this was a put-on, that maybe one of my friends had put him up to it, but it’s slightly too early for April Fool’s Day and they were honestly just as surprised as I was.  Not to mention beamingly happy for me.

He never did come back with the book, sadly, so I guess he wasn’t able to lay hands on his copy after all.  But I hope I can get him a signed copy somehow, to thank him for that one little moment of feeling like a goddamn rock star.

I’m working on a “second edition” of Slices already, even though it only came out last October.  There are a few reasons for this:

Let’s talk about that last one.  One of the main criticisms leveled against self-published works is their lack of editing.  (Well, really, right now I’m just talking about proofreading, but more on that distinction at a later date.)  And sure, it’s a fair criticism.  Encountering a ton of spelling errors and grammar mistakes in a self-pub book is enough to jerk the reader right back out of the story, and remind them that what they’re reading isn’t a “real” book after all.

I’m a very good proofreader, generally.  I mean, I’ve done it professionally for years.  After three good hard passes over the text, I was reasonably convinced that it was as error-free as I could make it on my own before I rushed it into print in time for Halloween.

But I knew I couldn’t have caught everything.  It’s a truism that you can never really properly proofread your own work — you know what you meant to say, and you’re just as likely to “see” those words as the ones that actually made it to the printed page.

It definitely needed someone other than me to take a look at it — but who?  Hiring a professional proofreader could cost me hundreds of dollars, and asking my friends to do it would be an imposition, and time-consuming — they have day jobs and lives of their own, natch.

I got to thinking yesterday, well, maybe it wouldn’t take so long if I could break the task up into smaller pieces — give each person a small chunk of it to proofread.  Hell, if I could somehow find a couple hundred people who were willing, I could hand each one of them a single page to edit –

And that’s when a little cartoon light-bulb appeared over my head.  (I have a box full of them in my closet at this point.  I don’t know what else to do with them. Are they recyclable?)

Enter Mechanical Turk, a service run by Amazon. It’s kind of like — well, here, I’ll let them describe it:

“Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details.”

That sounded perfect.  I took the PDF of my finished book and split it apart into single pages using a program called PDFsam, uploaded the pages to my webserver, and wrote up a description of what I wanted done, how much I was going to pay for it — I set the rate at ten cents per page, which looked to be about standard — and uploaded a file of links to the pages, and flipped the switch.

About seven hours later, the book was completely done.  I’m entirely happy with the results.  There were, as I expected, a ton of “false positives” — people had flagged “grammatical errors” that I had used intentionally for effect, and there were a couple of people out there with some strange and baroque ideas about comma placement — but the Turkers had also found a bunch of typos and other legitimate minor mistakes that I had never, ever noticed.  And the whole process only cost me about twenty bucks.

A lot of you out there reading this are probably thinking, well, they can’t have done as good a job as a professional proofreader would have, and that might be true, but I think they did a damn good job. I feel a lot more confident in the text now, knowing that I had not just another pair of eyes looking at it, but a couple hundred pairs of eyes.  If you’ve got a book that could use some scrutiny, and you want it fast and cheap, then this is for you.  Give it a try.

Urban fantasy writer Seanan McGuire talks about how the old fairy tales lost their middle ground and divided into fantasy for children and horror for adults, and how that division is finally healing itself:

“We never really let go of the older, twistier stories; we just put them on shelves for a little while, until we could figure out what to do with them. How to make the a functional part of our world again. Bit by bit, we’ve been rediscovering those old paths, and realizing that fairy tales really were urban fantasy, as we currently define it. ‘Fantasy set in what is essentially the real world, mingling with real people, in real situations.’ Well, once upon a time, ‘the real world’ wasn’t a city, it was a big, scary wood where there might be wolves, or robbers, or any one of a thousand other things. ‘Real people’ weren’t businessmen and police, they were woodcutters and tinkers and little old women whose granddaughters brought them baskets full of goodies. The world changed, the stories moved on…but the roots remained.”

— The Three Sisters: Fantasy, Horror, and Marchen, by Seanan McGuire | Penguin Blog

This is a really neat, beautifully-written piece, and you really should go read the whole thing.

Dean Wesley Smith takes on one of the biggest sacred cows of the writing business — namely, the idea that first drafts are worthless, that a story or a novel is only any good if you’ve revised and rewritten it several times over.  Actually, he says, this kind of treatment often just makes your writing worse, not better:

“The creative side is just a better writer than the critical side, no matter what the critical side tries to tell you. Remember, the critical side has a voice, usually a voice of restraint and worry, but the creative side [...] is your two-year-old child. It has no voice of reason and no way to fight. But if you let the child just play and get out of its way and stop trying to put your mother’s or father’s voice on everything it does, you will be amazed at what you create.

[If] you are rewriting and not selling, try to stop rewriting and just mail your work. You might be stunned at what happens.

Just remember, the writing process has nothing to do with the finished work. Never tell anyone you ‘cranked that off’ or that it’s a ‘first draft.’ Let them believe you worked like a ditch digger on the story, rewrote it 50 times, workshopped it a dozen times, and struggled over every word. Won’t hurt.”

— Dean Wesley Smith » Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Rewriting.

Okay, so, you watch horror movies, read horror novels . . . . Seen any good horror photography lately?

Don’t know what I’m talking about?  Then you need an introduction to the world of Joshua Hoffine:

“Horror, as an art form, draws its strength from the Unconscious.

Horror photography is able to present these abstract and forgotten fears in literal terms.

I stage my photo shoots like small movies, with sets, costumes, elaborate props, fog machines, and special effects make-up. Everything is acted out live in front of the camera. I use friends and family members, including my own daughters, as actors and crew.”

If you like the pictures he’s posted up at his main site, then you’ve got to check out the Joshua Hoffine Horror Blog, where he goes into lots of great behind-the-scenes detail about all the work that goes into each shot.

The main thing that to this day holds me back from dressing like a goddamn grownup is my ongoing love affair with the logo T-shirt — movie T-shirts, band T-shirts, comic book logo T-shirts . . . my wardrobe is full of them.  (This is probably partly why I’ve gravitated toward occupations that tolerate my juvenile dress sense, such as “web developer” and “indie writer.”)

If you also happen to love T-shirts, and you (of course!) love books, then this is where a good chunk of your disposable income will be going from now on:

Out of Print celebrates the world’s great stories through fashion. Our shirts feature iconic and often out of print book covers. Some are classics, some are just curious enough to make great t-shirts, but all are striking works of art.

We work closely with artists, authors and publishers to license the content that ends up in our collections. Each shirt is treated to feel soft and worn like a well-read book.

— Out of Print Clothing

I’ve heard good things for a long time about a piece of software called Scrivener, which is not so much a traditional “word processor” as it is a writing project management system, useful for writing and organizing long projects like non-fiction books, novels, and screenplays. It sounded great, and all the cool kids were using it — but unlike the cool kids, I don’t have a Mac, so I haven’t been able to try it. But now, it’s finally available for Windows (in beta, at least), so I downloaded it this weekend and fired it up. The interface was a little intimidating at first, and the tutorial almost overwhelmingly long, but everything made perfect sense by the time I was done, and yeah, it looks really useful.

So I thought I’d load Still Life into it. Still Life is a novel I wrote some time ago, an overgrown NaNoWriMo project that grew out of “One Last Sunset,” one of the stories in Slices.

I’ve known for a while that this book needed a little love and attention before I ever let it see the light of day — basically, the first chapter or two is roughly the existing short story as written, with the rest of the book roughly bolted onto it. There were some fairly serious plot and stylistic mismatches between the beginning and the rest of the manuscript, and I was already planning on more or less throwing out those first two chapters and rewriting them from scratch. But, really, I thought the rest of the book needed a bit of revision and polishing, but was mostly ready to go.

…. Oh, man, this thing needs so much work.

Once I imported the whole thing into Scrivener and started breaking it apart into scenes, I realized that a lot of the scenes need to be drastically reworked. A lot of the description needs to be fleshed out a little, and some of the dialog needs to be rewritten into, uhhh, sentences that people might actually speak. Worst of all, there are many, many scenes that are more like outlines, sections where my protagonist just tells you what happened instead of the reader actually getting to see it. I can tell what I was trying to do — I was trying to give a sense that time was slipping by with the protagonist being only barely aware of it, which is thematically important, but, the end result just feels kind of rushed.

I suppose none of this should really surprise me. It turns out I wrote this thing nearly ten years ago — I hadn’t realized it had been that long — and really, I should hope I’m a better writer now at forty than I was at thirty.

On the bright side — and there is a bright side — the plot works even better than I remember. There were several twists and turns where I thought, “oh, right, that bit was clever,” so there’s no major restructuring that needs to be done. And while the dialog may make me wince in some of the scenes, there are other scenes where it just sings.

So this is still totally salvageable, and I’ve got some great ideas about some of the changes I want to make, and Scrivener is making the whole project seem a lot more manageable than it might have been otherwise. Maybe even fun. I’ll keep you posted.

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