Counting Heads

Ebook Launch and Giveaway

2012-02-13T13:43:00.001-09:00

At long last, I am pleased to announce the publication of two ebooks, “My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction” and “The Wedding Album.” The first is a collection of three flash fiction stories first published in the British science journal Nature, and I’m giving it away for free. The second is a novella first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and probably my most popular and widely translated work to date.

In order to make a splash, I’m giving away the “My Morning Glory” mini-collection for free, along with a bonus short story (see below). Because of Amazon’s proprietary exclusivity rules, I’ll have to do this in two phases. First comes Nook. Download for free until Monday, February 20. And then from Thursday, February 23 through Monday, February 27, download them from Amazon for free.

Not to make too big a deal about it, but this is more than just a book launch. It’s also the launching of my new role as e-publisher. The synergistic, skill-extension effect of the personal computer and the Internet has finally caught up with authorship, and all hell is breaking loose. With the introduction of the Kindle only three years ago, the traditional barriers to book manufacture and distribution have been battered down. Tens of thousands of aspiring authors have rushed in where only traditional publishers used to tread. Now, literally, anyone who’s ever wanted to publish a real book (in both digital and POD editions) and sell it around the world can do so at minimal cost and fuss. (Grammer, speling & punctuation is optional ;)

Suddenly there are channels to put books into the hands of the reading public that do not involve traditional publishing. Trailblazing authors have already racked up digital bestsellers without NYC’s input. Traditional publishing is reeling with the changes and trying to adapt, and someday it may figure out a new business model (transmedia novels, anyone?). In the meantime, we mid-list authors of the old regime are scrambling to stay afloat in the new. One thing many authors are doing, now that we’ve been given the tools, is to bring out our backlists in ebook format. I’m giving that a try; in my case I only own the ebook rights to my short stories, and I’m only planning on e-publishing these few. (You can already buy “MMG” and “TWA” along with 8 other stories in my Del Rey collection, Getting to Know You.) If all goes well, I may self-pub my next novel, Camp Tribulation, (partly because I’m doubtful any legacy publisher will touch it--it’s that good!--or, maybe it’s no good at all; I don’t know; still too early to tell; it’s about two years away from completion).

One may wonder why I am e-publishing “TWA.” After all, it’s been reprinted about a dozen times and translated into five foreign languages and is easily found on pirate sites. Hasn’t everyone already read it who’s going to read it? I hope not. The fact that it has done so well for so long suggests that, given a little nudge, it might have the right stuff to find new readers on its own who may become new fans.

A literary agent once said that in order to make a living by writing fiction these days, an author needs 20,000 fans. (I think the agent was Donald Maass.) I don’t know how accurate the figure is, but it sounds about right. If it is, I still have a lot of recruitment to do.

I expect that anyone who regularly checks this blog has already read “TWA,” but maybe you know someone who hasn’t. Maybe someone who received a Kindle or Nook for Christmas or Valentine’s Day and is searching for something good to read on it. If so, please do me the fannish favor of passing this link to them.

On the other hand, unless you have a subscription to Nature (or belong to an institution that does), you may not have read the flash fiction stories. Please download “My Morning Glory” at no cost, with my compliments.

But wait, there’s more! For a limited time I’m also giving my Playboy story away for free, “She Was Good—She Was Funny.” It’s not SF, but it’s kick-in-the-pants fun, and if you read it, you’ll have a little taste of what it’s like to live (and love) in the sub-Arctic.

So, Nookies, get your complimentary copies now! And Kindlers, go to Amazon beginning February 23. (I'll post a reminder.)

The New Cover

2012-01-15T14:46:00.003-09:00

It's minus 40 degrees F in Fairbanks right now. It was supposed to "warm up" to minus 19, warm enough for my 1992 Mazda pickup to bounce and slide down the road to the grocery store. But it didn't warm up, and I'm literally tossing one log after another into the wood stove. The temp hasn't risen above minus 30 degrees outside my door for 3 days now.

That's the reason for this rare Sunday post. I believe I have finished, at long long last, the cover for my ebook version of "The Wedding Album." I wanted to share it with you (and to give anyone a last chance to send me feedback). I'm liking this one a lot. It seems to have enough science fictional ambiance to telegraph its genre. IMO, it's visually intriguing. And it does the job (remain legible/iconic) at all sizes from 100 pixels wide to full-sized ebook cover (590 x 750).

I modified two images from Wikimedia Commons for the cover illustration. The kissing couple is from "backlight-wedding" by David Ball. The background is from "Have Your Cake - wedding cake with red swirls" by Terry Johnston.

I don't know why I took so long with this damn cover. I was starting to think I'd never get it done. Now that it is, the new ebooks won't be far behind.

An Illustrated Account of the Last 6 Weeks

2011-12-10T15:15:00.009-09:00

The novel burbles along. The deeper I get the deeper it gets. Hope I can pull it off. I'm getting pretty sure of the title and I feel like I can divulge it. My novel in progress is called Tribulation Camp. Also, my main protagonist is now named Hadrian Haden. We'll see how long that sticks.

Here in Interior Alaska we got a head start on winter. The last two weeks of November took a nose dive, and we got down to minus 41. We broke six all-time record lows, five of them on consecutive nights. The photo above is of my wood yard. I'm having to buy firewood this winter, and what you see represents a two-cord delivery of 8-foot logs.

Last I heard, the Occupy Fairbanks diehards are still camped in the park and have maintained a continuous presence through the two weeks of extreme cold. In my last post I incorrectly identified the park as being a city park. It's actually a borough park (our boroughs are like your counties) and the official dealing with them is the borough mayor. The campers have two arctic tents with stoves. So far the mayor has resisted calls to clear the park and says the campers have 1st Amendment rights to assemble. Good for him.

I'm still working on the cover to "The Wedding Album" ebook. I started to feel like I was over-thinking it, and I'm still open to hiring a real illustrator when I can. In the meantime, I've spent countless hours browsing the sites with Creative Commons, public domain, or reasonably priced images including: Wikimedia, Flikr, Deviant Art. This last one, Deviant Art, is an amazing community of incredibly talented artists, many of whom I'd like to hire someday.

The last I posted, this was the stage the cover was at. (click on photos for larger size) I asked for and got valuable feedback from some of you. My main problem with it was that nothing about the image was science fictional. I did locate some Photoshop tools and filters I had been unaware of and spent some time sexing up the rings.

But in the end, the objection was the same, not SFnal enough. I kept browsing.

I found this wedding cake topper featuring elegant robots. I fell in love with it and tried to make it work as a cover image. But it's just too whimsical for the story, and I had to let it go. If I ever get married again, I'm sure to have a robot cake topper. I encourage you to visit the online store of the artist, Pete, and see all the other robotic accessories he sells.

I took another tack and the image above is the current iteration of the cover image. I'm liking it a lot. It evokes the story quite nicely. And I think it says science fiction. What do y'all think?

Occupy Fairbanks

2011-10-29T16:15:00.003-08:00

Just returned from the Occupy Fairbanks march. I wasn’t dressed for the weather, a clear, relatively mild day (13 °F), and had to bail before all the speeches were done. About 40 people marched, pretty much the same crowd I saw when I protested the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike those protests, this time I didn’t see any passers-by flipping us off or screaming insults. There are a few people camping out in a city park in solidarity with other protesters around the world, but they are having problems with the city and police. Nothing major yet. I've read in the news how other cities are holding their fire against Occupy protesters because they think the coming winter weather will do the job for them. It seems to me that Fairbanks protesters might have some cold weather expertise to share.

Though the Occupy movement has no generally accepted list of demands yet, I agree with most of the ones I’ve heard: breaking up financial institutions that are too big to fail, bringing criminal charges against the managers and executives of institutions that caused the recession with illegal activities, ending the wars, ending corporate welfare, and so on.

My biggest beef is with the Supreme Court that, beginning with the 14th amendment in the 19th century, declared corporations to be persons with civil rights. I’m concerned about the political power that major corporations are able to muster with large amount of money, of course, but being a science fiction writer, I can’t help projecting my worries beyond the current situation to the not-to-distant future when science has invented true Artificial Intelligence.

Corporations are cleverly crafted machines, and machines do not have to be sentient to have an agenda and the means to pursue it. Their ultimate purpose is profit, not providing products or services. Products and services are merely the means to that profit. They have no inherent interest in human affairs, the planet, justice, or any other issue insofar as it doesn’t turn a profit. They are eternal entities but not very good at looking at the long-term consequences of their actions. A corporation will catch and sell the last fish in the ocean before it wonders where all the fish have gone. Supposedly people drive corporations, but it seems clear to me that the bigger and more successful a corporation becomes the more the corporation drives its board of directors and executives. If they do not serve its purposes (profit), they are discharged.

Thus the corporate model is a perfect, ready made immortal “body” for an immortal AI to move into. When AIs arrive on the scene, I imagine they may have a hard time winning their own civil rights at first. The same people who give corporations a pass on social issues will object to conferring equal rights to soulless, unchristian AIs. However, enterprising AIs will be able to incorporate themselves and step right into personhood. In this sense the coming Singularity may look something like a hostile takeover.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-08T12:38:00.002-08:00

Of all the tributes I've heard this week, I was most moved by people who told how the works of this man changed their lives. I must raise my hand and declare myself one of these.

Back in 1986 I was in bad need of a job. Both my private business and marriage had just failed. Counter intuitively, I felt that it was a great opportunity to finally quit stalling and begin to work on my dream of becoming a published author. But I needed income, something to get by with while I took the time to write.

I interviewed around town for a job. My most marketable skill in those days was as a graphic designer. I had worked at the local paper for a few years. They had turned my boyhood training in fine art into a rough and ready commercial art skill. I sold and laid out auto and real estate ads, a lot of them full-page ads during those boom times. The newspaper taught me the skills to manually lay out a mechanical, a blueprint of sorts in different colored inks on tissue paper. The typesetters, compositors, camera, and others in production used them to build the ads, Within the confines of the medium, I grew to feel quite proficient, if not artful.

So in 1986, I was lucky to interview with the owner of Express Copy & Graphics for a job. She had a full time designer position to fill, one of the earliest Mac computers, laser printers, and version 1.2 of PageMaker.

Thus I arrived at the ground floor of the digital revolution in printing. Desktop publishing, launched on Apple's machines, eventually brought down an entrenched giant of an industry--traditional printing. And I was not only witness to the complete upheaval, but served as a grave digger. It took me almost a year to translate my manual layout skills onto the Mac, and I never looked back. What with practicing, teaching, and free-lancing, I earned my bread and butter for over 20 years in graphic design on ever-improving models of Macs.

The fall of traditional printing was followed by the fall of traditional publishing, a revolution we are witnessing these days with ebooks. In this the iPad, revolutionary in so many other areas, is running a distant third (I'm only guessin) behind Kindle. The Kindle Fire, just released, could be the final nail in the coffin of print books as big business.

But by far the newest technological revolution Steve Jobs cast upon the world has been largely unnoticed in the press. I'm talking about Siri, the personal assistant on the new iPhone 4S, which was released on the day before Jobs died. I wonder if he had any free attention in those last hours to marvel at the little wonder he had just tossed into the world. I've heard that people were expecting Apple to announce the iPhone 5 and were disappointed when it didn't. Don't they know that the lucky owners of the iPhone 4S will hold in their hands the first iteration of . . . wait for it . . . the first iteration of the belt valet? Trust me, boys and girls, this is major. Even if Siri flops, like the Newton tablet did, the AI assistant cat is out of the bag. Thank you, Steve Jobs. We won't soon forget you.

The New Book Cover

2011-10-01T11:43:00.006-08:00

I've gotten some helpful feedback on the cover in the comments section. It provides gist for a few blog entries starting with this one. Renelle (one of my first readers) asks:

It's a nice cover, David. Do ebook covers serve the same purpose as (real books? meatbooks? what the heck do I call them?) printed book covers? Does it need to stand out in a crowd? Pique your interest?

She also says: How many sizes is it going to be viewed at? How small will it be on, say, an iPhone?

These are all great questions because they reflect the revolution going on in media, with the rise of the phones and tablets (the fifth and fourth screens, respectively, in the life of the modern consumer). If paper books are truly going away and ebooks springing up to replace them, then what of the cover? Is the ebook cover the same or is it different from the paper book cover? (I don't know what else to call them either--traditional books, hard copy books, eventually POD books.)

It seems to me that all commercial covers, whether traditional or digital, must stand out on the crowded rack. Their purpose is mainly to sell the book. The method they employ is usually to be somehow evocative of the subject of the book while piquing the reader's interest. In this the digital book cover is no different than the traditional one, except the crowd it needs to outshine is digital. That is, the ebooks I'm doing will have no POD incarnation and will only be sold online. The online racks belong to Amazon, B&N, and others, and they display covers in sizes ranging from about 60 pixels to about 200 pixels in width, depending where on the site they are displayed. A 60-px cover is really tiny. Here's an early attempt at the cover for My Morning Glory at 60 px. You generally can't read any of the text at this size, not even the title. Objects are hard to distinguish. You may have only a shape and a color. But if you've already looked at the cover in a larger size, then this one acts like a little icon or trademark (a glyph).

Here's an intermediate size that appears on some Amazon pages. (I'm basing these on the Amazon site. Other sites have own sizes. And I have no idea how they appear on a tablet or smart phone.)It's 100 px wide, and at this size you should be able to read something, probably the title, maybe the author name. Object should be discernible.

And finally the size on an individual book's main page. As far as the buying experience goes, this 200 px size cover is the largest that will appear. Sometimes, you can click on a cover and see a larger size, or you can click on "Inside this Book" and see a larger version of the cover, but I would guess that most people don't. So this size has to do all the work.

You should be able to identify objects portrayed and read the title, author's name, and maybe the pitch line (subhead). IMO, there is no place for sub-sub heads.

That's on the sales side. On the reader's side, e-readers also display the cover at about the size of a paperback book. The older Kindles displayed in B&W, but the iPad and Nook are color, and now with the introduction of the Kindle Fire, it seems to me that color will rule on the cover as well as inside the book. The insides of print books have only been shy of color in the past because of the cost of extra print runs that color entailed. But e-color is free, and I believe that ebook designers will embrace it.

More discussion later.

Still here

2011-09-24T11:44:00.003-08:00

I seem to have missed a week or two of posting. No excuses except that I have been mightily distracted by the Rat Race. Anyway, I have been plugging away at trying to come up with the cover for my next ebook. The image above is the current candidate. I'm not too jazzed by it because the background is brown, a no-no in graphic design, and because it looks so mundane. I'd much prefer a SFnal image that evokes the future, the Singularity, AIs or almost anything else. But I'm at the end of my rope. I've spent weeks browsing wedding images online and in bridal magazines, and this is the best I have come up with, given my limited illustration skills.

So, how about some feedback. Anyone like this cover?

Also, is there anyone out there who's read "The Wedding Album" and has a better idea? I'm all ears.

I recommend this book

2011-09-10T13:20:00.002-08:00

I am totally engrossed in a book of SF theory called The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, by Alexei and Cory Panshin. What the authors lay out in this tome (of 685 pages) has provided me insight into what I am doing with my life. So it’s an important book to me, and I’d like to tell you about it.

Chapter one begins: “Science fiction is a literature of the mythic imagination. In science fiction stories, spaceships and time machines carry us outside ourselves, outside our world, outside everything we know, to distant realms that none of us has ever seen . . .” Here is outlined the two chief themes of the book, myth and transcendence.

Transcendence can be defined as moving beyond the range of normal human experience to realms that are irrational, elusive, wonderful, and never completely to be known. The label used throughout the book to denote normalcy is “the Village,” the place we spend our daily lives. Transcendent reality, the land of mystery and wonder, is denoted by the title, “The World Beyond the Hill.” Most humans throughout history have been content to live out their lives in the relative safety of the Village while yearning to glimpse the World beyond the Hill. For most of human history, that outer world was occupied by supernatural forces, gods, and demons. Direct experience of that world was never a good idea, was mediated by shamans and priests, and required sacrifice and prayer.

A myth, by popular definition, is a false idea or belief, such as the myth that corporations are people or that lowering taxes can spur employment. In popular usage, mythology is the study of a belief system that is as ancient and dead as the gods of Greek mythology.

A more scholarly definition of myth is a little more complicated. A myth is a set of principles (or collection of stories) that, using the best, most reliable knowledge of the day, explains transcendent mysteries: who made us? where did we come from? what does it all mean? where do we go when we die?

Because there is a tendency for people to not recognize the tenuous nature of their own belief systems, they tend to call their view of reality the truth and everyone else’s a myth. It’s easy today to dismiss Mount Olympus and its cast of titans, gods, and mortals--Zeus, Cassandra, Achilles--no one believes that stuff anymore. It’s myth. What we too often forget is that, during its own time, Greek mythology represented the cutting edge of knowledge and helped explain everything from lightning bolts to love. We also forget that our own era’s myth of science, no matter how rational it seems to us today, may well be supplanted tomorrow by a whole new set of operating principles and that our truths may then seem just as quaint and dead.

This book, then, follows the rise of the myth of science through the lens of fiction. From the Ages of Reason and Romanticism, through the Age of Technology, to the Atomic Age, the authors trace the decline of the myth of spirit in the West in favor of the new myth of science. Part world history, part chronicle of seminal works of fiction, this book creates a framework for understanding the genesis and effect of major works of science fiction (and proto-SF) such as Frankenstein; The Time Machine; War of the Worlds; Looking Backward, 2000-1887; “Who Goes There;” I, Robot; and hundreds more.

Through this book, I have been able to view my own scribbling as part of a grand tradition of myth-making. Now I see why I am drawn to writing SF and not your everyday, Village-centric, mainstream fiction. My only disappointment is that the authors stopped their critique of history at the year 1945, the dawn of the Atomic Age. How I wish they’d take up their pens and resume their analysis to include our current era, the Information Age.

I have only one quibble with the book: the authors seem to presume that the myth of science reins supreme everywhere in the West, that everyone agrees that spiritualism and supernaturalism are as archaic as the Greek gods. I don’t know where the authors live--in Europe?-- but here in the U.S. the vast majority of people still have at least one foot firmly planted in the Dark Ages. When leading presidential candidates refudiate the “theory” of evolution, claim Jesus as their personal savior, or believe a guy named Smith dug up heavenly golden plates that only an angel could interpret, science gets short shrift. It occurs to me that the sustaining force motivating me to write my current novel is the desire to finally and fully bust the myth of the supernatural.

Good luck with that, dude.

That's Hadrian, not Adrian, if you please

2011-08-27T16:04:00.003-08:00

Another hour before the library closes, and since I'm in an updating mood, I'll spill the latest news on the novel-in-progress. When I posted a couple of weeks ago that I was about halfway through the first draft, something happened, and I couldn't seem to make any forward progress. So I did something long overdue; I did a synopsis of what I had written so far. This entailed skimming the several hundred pages of manuscript and summing up each scene in a line or two, adding notes, and rearranging scenes. Gave me a good idea of what's what and what's missing. It took about a week and a half to do, and by the end I was able to continue pushing the story forward with a better clue as to what I was writing. Am pretty pleased with it too, if I can risk tempting Fate.

A few posts ago I mentioned that one of my main protagonists was still going by the acronym HAD (Hunky Alaskan Dude). I found myself writing HAD so many times that I got to like the sound of it. So I'm auditioning the name Hadrian for this character. A Roman emperor, the name suits him. Hadrian Hudson, maybe, the attempt by his parents for alliteration. There's the bonus twist that everyone keeps wanting to call him Adrian and how he responds to it. Imagine going your entire life having to correct how people pronounce your name. Wait a minute, that's what I have to do. Looking up Hadrian on a baby name site, I find that it's not and "never was" in the top 1000 popular baby boy names in the U.S., whereas, Adrian is in the top 100. So, if this hunky dude character catches on with future readers, it can be a distinctive name.

The photo at the top is from my McCarthy trip of last month. It's the ruins of the mill at the Kennecott copper mine. The ore came down from the mine, another 5000 ft straight up, by tramway. The ore underwent processing by four different methods that extracted 98% of the copper. The mill today is owned by the National Park Service, which is stabilizing and renovating it for future tours. Click on the photo for a larger size.

Ebook Update

2011-08-27T15:23:00.004-08:00

The image above is the cover of my upcoming ebook. It has taken me an inordinate amount of time to create it, the cover, that is. The content was quick, a matter of reformatting a word processing file. This ebook contains my three "flash fiction" stories that appeared in the British science journal, Nature, on their "Futures" page. When it's ready to go, I'm going to publish it for the Kindle and Nook, and it will be free. (I'll also offer it for free on this blog.) It will point the reader to my novella, also upcoming, "The Wedding Album." But before I can finish the first, I have to have the cover of the second ready to go, and that's what's holding me up.

I have worked as a graphic designer, not an illustrator, and so I generally need a photo or image to get started. The one above is a photoshop melding of two images in the public domain I found on Wikimedia. The execution was simple, once I had the concept and images, but that took me about six weeks to develop. Too long. Now with "The Wedding Album," which is a more important work, I'm in the same boat. Concept, images, integration, layout--my head hurts.

If any of you have read and liked "TWA" and have ideas or images (plus the rights to use them) to put on the cover, I would most ardently appreciate it if you contacted me. I can't offer you a lot of money, but you'd get an acknowledgement and, if you're a professional artist, an ad at the end of the ebook to advertise your business. In any case, stay tuned for the release of these two ebooks.

Like me, or don't, but just "like" me.

2011-08-27T14:50:00.002-08:00

I have just created a "page" on FB, as opposed to a "profile." I've done this because there's a setting that will automatically add whatever post I put here, on my blog, to my page. It's supposed to go to the "notes" area of my page, but I see that there's a default option that adds it to my wall as well (or instead). I don't know; I'll use it for a while and see what happens. I intend to keep this blog as my main vehicle for doing updates and news. If I can write stuff once and have it magically propagate to the world at large, I'd be happy.

I encourage all my "friends," friends, and fans to "like" me on FB if you wish for my weekly postings to appear on your wall. Here's my page address (as best as I can tell).

Snake Oil in Heaven

2011-08-20T16:32:00.003-08:00

Barnes & Noble--You gotta love a bookstore that encourages you to read their magazines and books in a comfortable atmosphere with no pressure to purchase them. They’ll even sell you food and drink to enjoy while you’re reading. Free wifi, and if you have a Nook, you can read anything in the store on it for free as well. I don’t know about their other stores, but the one here in Fairbanks has an open fireplace in which the fire burns all year, even in August (when our nighttime temps are already dipping into the 40s). I sure hope this company survives the Great Recession because I would miss it if it closed.

Anyway, when I visit the store, I sometimes pull two or three bestsellers off the rack, find a comfy armchair in front of the fire, and read the first chapters. I do this to keep up with what’s selling and to try to soak up whatever quality it is that makes a book a bestseller. If I read enough bestselling first chapters--or so goes my thinking--maybe I too can write a bestseller.

Last week I picked up a worthy exemplar of the genre, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. There are over 4 million copies in print, Sony is developing the movie, and the book is being translated into 30 languages. So this is no slouch of a bestseller. In the corner of the cover is a cute little boy in a funky yellow sweater vest smiling at the viewer. As well he should--he’s one little boy who’ll be able to go to any Bible college he chooses.

The book is by a Protestant pastor in Nebraska who’s son suffered acute appendicitis shortly before his fourth birthday and underwent emergency surgery. During the next few years, the boy described to his father a heavenly journey he made while under anesthesia, strictly uncoached, of course. He described Jesus, the saints and angels, dead relatives (including a miscarried elder sister no one had ever told him about and a great grandfather who died 30 years before the boy was born). I found all of this so convincing, so utterly believable, that I have dropped my long-held atheism in favor of Christianity. Yes, I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior at Barnes & Noble. How could I not? Only truth can come from the mouth of a babe (and his totally genuine garage-door selling, pastor father), right?

Things I have always wondered about are now clear. For instance, everyone in Heaven (excepting Jesus and God) has wings! (Because obviously, divine beings need wings to stay afloat up there.) And they all wear white robes just like they did in the olden days, even Jesus, with colored sashes. Jesus is the only one with a purple sash, and Jesus has a beard, just like he does in the pictures. Plus he’s white and has blue eyes! I am so glad that the Bible storybooks have gotten this stuff right. Plus God is really big and sits on a throne. As I said, utterly convincing.

As you may be able to tell, I read more than just the first chapter of this book, but how can you blame me? What price salvation? And here’s the most astounding information in this whole astounding story--unbaptised, unsaved babies do go to heaven. As you may know, we Christians have debated this issue for centuries. Since the Bible clearly states that only the saved go to heaven, and to be saved one needs to confess one’s sins and accept Jesus as one’s Savior, pre-verbal babies are pretty much screwed, not to mention unborn fetuses. (If you don’t believe me on this point, ask your pastor.)

Where do all these dead, unsaved souls go? We’re not sure, especially since the Catholics (who are kinda like Christians) refudiated the teaching of Limbo last year. But real Christians know, and it takes a lot of pastoral sand to say it out loud, that babies, including the 40 million aborted ones, spend eternity in Hell! Kinda harsh, I agree, but our God is a just God.

Now, thanks to this book, we can be assured that unsaved babies do go to heaven after all. This kid met his miscarried sister in heaven. So that clinches it. Case closed.

I should have stopped reading right there and left the store floating on angel wings like four million other lucky readers. But no, I had to turn to the back to read about the author’s ghostwriter (or “collaborator” as they’re called now). Her name is Lynn Vincent, and it turns out that she was Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter for Going Rouge: An American Life. Now, I’ve read that book, also childlike in its innocence, also a multi-million-copy bestseller, but patently fiction. It makes me wonder, could this book be fiction too? Oh, damn, when everything was becoming so clear.

Speak, Memory

2011-08-13T15:54:00.002-08:00

One of my favorite authors is Vladimir Nabokov. His Lolita remains in my top ten fave books of all time. It's about a truly horrific man, a child molester. But starting with his name, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist/narrator presents himself as a captive of his own abusive proclivities in a most engaging, humorous, and literary stylistic way. It's a testament to Nabokov's skill to pull this off, not exactly creating sympathy for the monster but allowing the reader to enter his headspace at all.

Anyway, I'm currently reading his incomplete final novel, The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun. It's less a novel draft than a look at his writing "process." The process of writing seems to be of perennial interest to aspiring writers. At every writing event I attend someone invariably asks the guest authors about it, as though following the proper process will guarantee literary success. Do you outline? Do you use one of the novel-writing computer applications? Do you have a daily word quota or work for a set number of hours? I love these questions because they are so easy to answer. Also because I, too, am curious about how other authors work. And I've always been curious about Nabokov's method because he was famous for writing his first drafts on 3 x 5 index cards. Moreover, he would shuffle the cards to change the order of the narration. A neat and difficult trick.

And now I can see the cards themselves in holograph. The book (pictured above; click to enlarge) by Knopf reproduces the 132 cards Nabokov was working on when he died. In fact, they are printed on card stock--both sides of the cards--making a very thick book. The preface says the cards are perforated so that you can tear them out and shuffle them yourself, but the edition I checked out from the library have the dashed line guides but no perforation. (Perhaps they printed a special library edition.) Why Nabokov wrote this way makes no sense to me. You can get only a paragraph or two on each card. And there must be other ways to shuffle scenes.

I get a lot of grief from fellow writers when they learn that I write my first few drafts in longhand. I've been told that that's why I write so slowly. Of course that's absurd. I write so slow because I think so slow. Duh. Over the years I've tried to come up with reasonable sounding arguments why writing in longhand is superior to using a word processor. The strongest of which, IMO, is that drafting on a word processor tends to "lock in" the text prematurely. The art of writing is in the rewriting, and the whole point of word processing is to free the author from rewriting. You can massage text with a word processor, auto-correct (purported) typos, and cut and paste whole strings of text, but that isn't rewriting. I don't know any author who keystrokes their entire books from scratch for each draft (as some authors did in the days of typewriters).

My argument may sound unconvincing, but that's OK. Now I can simply point to Nabokov and say that he not only wrote in longhand but he wrote on index cards.

I say "purported" typos above because auto-correct tools are maddeningly conventional, and I know Nabokov would have hated them. (He died in 1977, a year after the first software-based word processor, Electric Pencil, was released.) You can't play with words when your computer keeps changing them back to accepted usage. In the first paragraph of this post, I wrote "fave books," and this word processor changed it to "face books." One processor I used kept changing "windows" to "Windows™." Need I say more? I can just see Nabokov keystroking "Humbert Humbert" and his computer deleting the redundancy. (And, yes, I know you can turn the auto features off.)

I never knew the circumstances of Nabokov's death. In the preface to this book, his son, Dmitri, wrote about it. Nabokov was chasing butterflies, his lifelong passion, on a steep slope in Davos in 1975, when he fell and wasn't able to get up by himself. Dmitri identifies this event as the beginning of a series of illnesses that ended with congestive bronchitis and three final gasps in 1977. While I dare not dispute his son's reckoning, the timeline conflicts with my own memory. In 1974 (not 1975) I read a newspaper article about Nabokov's ill health. In those days I worked as an orderly at Bartlett Memorial Hospital in Juneau, AK. It was the graveyard shift in the intensive care unit, and mortality was on my mind. I was afraid my face author (oops, fave author) would shuffle off before I could express my appreciation. So I dashed off my first fan letter (in longhand) thanking him for so many hours of reading enjoyment.

One last observation about the index cards. I notice that when he crosses out a word or phrase, he obliterates it, making it impossible to know what it had been. I guess when a word is wrong, it deserves capital punishment with no chance of parole.

Voices in my head

2011-08-08T19:31:00.003-08:00

I saw an article that fascinates me and has a direct impact on writing fiction. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have found that when reading direct quotations, the brain "hears" the voice of the speaker. This is something that you may have known intuitively, but now there's data to back it up. I know for myself that when I read, the voice I hear conforms to any hint the author has given about the character's voice: accent, tone, phrasing. On the other hand, if I happen to know the author, I hear their voice when their characters speak. Some more than others. Whenever I read Pat Cadigan's work, it's almost as though she's reading out loud to me.

When I read Nick Hornby's novel, Juliet, Naked, I somehow got it into my head that the book's narrator was Hugh Grant, and I heard him throughout the book. It was hard not to.

Knowing about this phenomena, an author could take steps to fix a particular voice in the reader's "inner ear." Maybe when a new character is introduced, the writer could describe it in an evocative way and reinforce it a few times.

An even more interesting device might be to recruit a well-known voice, such as that of a popular actor, to serve as a character's voice. It wouldn't be hard. "Joe Entwurst, despite his slight build, had a deep, rich, resonating voice, like the actor James Earl Jones. 'My children,' he crooned. "All of you are my precious children.'" Hmm, you'd probably have to phrase it properly and use appropriate diction. But it could be done. I think I will try it out in the current novel. I wonder if there are persona/trademark issues. Can you copyright the voices in our heads?

The photo above is of me standing inside the frame of the teepee we built during our recent trip to the Park taken by my niece Jenn.

What's in a name?

2011-07-30T11:40:00.002-08:00

High frequency, for one. Amazon does some interesting content analysis of the books they sell, including word clouds and textual readability and complexity scores, not to mention numbers of words and sentences. From this I learn that there are 15,287 sentences in my novel Counting Heads. More interesting—the five most frequently used words in the book are character names. I don't know if that's typical in a novel, but it would suggest that name choice is serious business. You don't want a stinker of a name showing up on every page.

What makes a good character name? What makes a memorable one? Dang if I know. I do know that I seem to always employ a large cast of characters in my stories, and so I have many opportunities to come up with names. The way I usually do it is to start writing the story and let the characters' names drop in as they may. Some appear early and some late. In the meantime, I give characters temporary names or initials. I may try various names out on a character for a few scenes to see if any fit.

In my novel-in-progress I already have a handful of characters with solid names, none of which I can divulge here. But one of my three main characters is still operating under his temporary appellation--HAD. It stands for Hunky Alaskan Dude. It was the placeholder my former Anchorage collaborator and I used for our protagonist candidates while we were brainstorming Sarah Palin story scenarios.

My own HAD is in his late 20s or early 30s, has lived in AK for about 10 years (up from LA), and worked for the NPS as a ranger for about 7. He's of the "partnership park" persuasion when it comes to the park service mission. He's a self-effacing young man, an atheist, a lover of French women, and a lover of the wilderness. No name has presented itself yet for his use. That's OK; there's time.

There's time because I'm only about halfway through the first draft. The middle of the first draft is both an exciting and scary time for me. I don't know how novel writing is supposed to work any better than I know how to name characters. Mostly I write down scenes as they present themselves to my mind's eye and trust that they are true and that more will come to me later. There is no outline, just a vague idea about the direction I'd like to go. Every other day a character says or does something surprising that changes the course of the story or reveals connections or fault lines or comedy or previously unknown facets of their personality. There's a point when the products of a sustained act of imagination--fictional stories and characters--acquire the feel of reality. Then I seem to remember them as much as imagine them. Until then it's a game of chasing shadows in the fog and hoping something worthwhile emerges.

The photo at the top is a street scene in McCarthy. One of the original buildings during the boom times, the hardware store now houses the Wrangell Mountain Center, an educational non-profit that sponsors summertime courses and field trips in the park. It would seem an unlikely building to inspire science fiction (at least before the genre-bending movie Cowboys and Aliens). But the truth of the matter is that ghost towns are a lifelong fascination of mine, and although they're not unique to Alaska, they may be the part of Alaska I find most inspiring. Deep-pocket captains of industry have come up here to extract fish, gold, copper, and oil for quick bucks. They tear up the wilderness, plop down instant communities, pile up fortunes, go bust, and leave on the last train out (before pulling up the rails behind them). They leave with what they can carry and they abandon the rest. Buildings weather and rot. Thirty years later, the coffee cup and sugar bowl are still sitting on the dining room table where the last resident left them before hurrying to the train station.

On my first day in Alaska, in July 1973, I met a man who gave me a job. He and his business partners owned the derelict Superior Cannery on Chichagof Island. It was closed in the 1930s, I think, and the owners liked to have a watchman on site during the summer to keep passing boaters from landing and stealing all the brass fittings. They loaned me a dog and a rifle and sent someone out from Tenakee Springs to check on me once a week and drop off groceries. The dog and I had a whole industrial ruin to ourselves to explore. I have stories from that time I am still trying to tell. With any luck, some of them can be put to rest with this book.

Here's another McCarthy picture. The pickup trucks are probably parked according to the last time they were in running condition. The building was made of poles nailed to a frame. Not a very stable construction method, but an accommodation to the state of the local timber. Because of the dry climate and historical wildfires during the copper mine heyday, the trees in nearby forests are skinny. Traditional log cabins around here are made with imported logs. Too bad no one's invented a willow bush cabin construction method.

AK Bush Trip--The Spike

2011-07-23T10:20:00.009-08:00

I'd like to say we planned it this way, but we didn't. It was sheer coincidence (or heavenly influence) that when we arrived at the subdivision, the first person we should run into was Mark V, its only full-time resident, who informed us that a centennial ceremony was planned in the mill town of Kennecott on Saturday to commemorate the completion of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway in March,1911.

During the original ceremony a century ago, the symbolic spike, which in railroad tradition is made from gold, was replaced by one cast of copper taken from a creek near the Bonanza mine. One hundred years later, the ceremonial spike, seen above, is made of iron and is plated in Rust-Oleum Antique Copper.

At least the spike under the copper paint looks like an authentic Carnegie iron spike from the CRNWern. There are plenty of them in circulation today, thanks to a gift to the McCarthy Museum from Carol M in memory of her husband, Harold M. Harold died last year at the age of 99. Carol donated his horde of railroad tie spikes, pictured above, for fund-raising. The museum was selling them for $2.00 each. I couldn't believe the low price. It took Harold over 20 years to build this tower-o-spikes, and when they're gone, they're gone. $20 each would be closer to the mark, IMO. If anyone out there collects historical artifacts, dig this. While NPS rules make it a federal offense to remove Kennecott artifacts, which are literally lying in plain sight, you can legally pick up a genuine CRNW spike for $2.00.

I used to have a small horde of CRNW spikes myself. I earned them the old-fashioned way in the early 80s. My ex and I spent parts of several years at Long Lake (mile 45 McCarthy Road). In those days the road was little more than gravel laid over the rail bed. The straight rails had been scavenged in the 1940s for the war effort, and the curved rails had been pushed into the brush alongside the tracks. The cross tie spikes, seven inches long, were left where they fell. The spikes have a preternatural shape that enables them to "float" to the top of a gravel bed. That means that each time the McCarthy Rd was graded, a new crop of spikes would surface. The surface of the road was pretty primitive to begin with. It ate tires and tore suspensions clean from the frames. The spikes added another dimension of fun to the McCarthy trip. Look closely at the copper spike above. Notice that it has a large lip on only one side of the spike. This is another deadly feature of their unholy design that makes them into ideal little tire mines. At speeds above 10 MPH, the front tire runs over the lip, flipping the spike up to the perfect angle to gore the rear tire to death.

After driving for hours at 10 MPH on a gravel road, the eye acquires a knack for spotting spikes. The custom on the road was to stop and pick 'em up as you spotted 'em. Harold's tower-o-spikes, therefore, took a lot of trips in and out to build.

BTW, Mark told us that last year, shortly before his death, Harold spoke to him about dying at age 99. He had been hoping to make it to 100, and when it was clear he wasn't going to, he said that, technically, he was already enjoying his 100th year of life since birth, so it was OK to go at age 99. Harold always saw the sunny side of things.

These days, with Princess Tours bringing busloads of tourons through the valley, the gravel road is kept in terrific shape and seems safe in places to drive 45 MPH (though the speed limit is 35).

The spikes rise no longer (though surely a few of them must lurk below the gravel surface, biding their time).

AK Bush Trip--part 1

2011-07-16T09:41:00.005-08:00

A couple of days after the 4th, we headed out of town, driving south and east approximately 360 miles, to our lot in the Park. It's a full day of driving, and the goal on this route is to leave Fairbanks by 10 AM, with the hope of pulling into the subdivision by 7pm.

However, we usually don't make it out of Dodge by 10 AM. Always that last minute glitch. (And that's how it was this time too.) My travel companions were my niece Jennifer Brenner and my friend Drake Boswell. Our ride was DB's commodious classic Alaska Pipeline truck, an 1987 GMC 3500 Sierra 3+3.

Jenn's from Portland, Oregon, where she works as an accountant and specializes in non-profits and small businesses. This was her first trip to Alaska. She shot the three photos below (on her Android MyTouch 4G). Double click the photos for a larger size.

This is a view of the Copper River looking northwest toward its headwaters. We are on the Edgerton Hwy, still a few miles outside the Park.

It shouldn't have surprised me that other authors have already set fictional stories in the Park. I'll bet there are more than the two I've found. As I said in an earlier post, Dana Stabenow has set her wildly popular Kate Shugak detective series in the Park. Kate is an Alaskan Native, and her fictional town of Niniltna seems to be a Native village with a population of several thousand, including members of diverse peoples: Ahtna, Upper Tanana, Eyak, Tlingit (and Yupik??). Niniltna seems to be located where McCarthy should be, near a historical copper mine. But it's obviously not McCarthy, which was a white town that served as "Sin City" to the company town of Kennecott. Stabenow has renamed other landmarks. The Copper River is the Kanuyaq (if this is a real word I haven't been able to find its definition) and Glennallen is Ahtna. The river has been moved east 100 miles to cut the park in two rather than serve as its western boundary. The Wrangell Mountains are the Quilak. Most tellingly, Stabenow doesn't even name this park where she has set 18 books but refers to it simply as "the Park."

The other author I have found is Kris Farmen, whose worthy first novel, The Devil's Share, is set there. He uses actual Park names and only invents a few of his own. All of the action takes place on the northeastern border of the park where it butts up against the Canadian Kluane game sactuary in the Yukon. I've never seen this part of the park, which is understandable since the park covers over 20,500 square miles. I haven't seen the coastal portion either (the park elevation goes from sea level to 18,000 feet and includes 160 miles of coastline and nine of the sixteen highest peaks in North America).

BTW, The Devil's Share is a great read. It follows the misadventures of a young man born in a remote cabin that was later confiscated by the Park Service, launching him on a lifelong quest to right that wrong. The author calls his character a "wild animal." I would call him a sociopathic serial killer. I still have a few pages to read, but I'm liking this book for its fearlessness and ferocity.

Click for an interactive map.

Authors probably change place names in their fiction for a varitey of reasons. For me at least, the biggest benefit is freeing up my imagination. I know a lot about McCarthy and environs that I hope to integrate into my story, but I don't want to be pinned down by disgruntled readers for (purposefully) mixing up dates and places. So I am following Farmen's lead and using actual place names, with a few exceptions. I am reinventing McCarthy as McHardy (big change, I know) and I am planting a whole new mountain, Solitude Mountain, south of it, rearranging several rivers to do so.

By setting a novel within a national park, the author must come to grips with how to portray the National Park Service. While most Americans might view the NPS as a mostly benign governmental agency that fosters and manages our treasured national wild places, Alaskans tend to hold a more jaundiced view. Consider these numbers; the state of Alaska covers an area equal to one-sixth of the area of the contiguous United States. That's huge. But only about 1 percent of Alaskan land is in private hands. The bulk of Alaska's land is owned by the Federal government, Native corporations, and the state. These giant landlords have strict policies that often conflict with residents' use of the land for subsistence, recreation, and development, not to mention commercial resource development. Tension between the feds and the state is a given.

Nationally, the Park Service itself has long operated under a mandate, official or not, of squeezing out any private inholders within park boundaries. Their methods, whether legal or extralegal, have enraged private property owners and their advocates throughout the country for decades. (I've just googled "national park service malfeasance" and gotten 266 million hits.) In Alaska, the relationship between individuals and the NPS was supposed to change in 1980 with ANILCA, the second large land claims act, and the establishment of the park. After all, contained within the park's 20,500 square miles are over a million acres of private land, a history of mining, and traditional land use going back generations. ANILCA mandated that the NPS respect the rights of these inholders and activities. Consequently, in the 1990s the NPS developed a new model for the land under its stewardship, the so-called "partnership parks" that views humans and traditional human activity as part of the landscape, to be celebrated, not expunged. Wrangell-St. Elias, by virtue of its size and history, is the ideal test case for this new philosophy. And for the most part the park service seems to be a benign neighbor, IMO. But over the years there have been a number of cases in which its older, more logical attitude, has resurfaced in attempts to harrass inholders. This is not limited to W-St. E. There's a trial awaiting a verdict in Fairbanks today about an incident last summer in another park, the Yukon-Charley. Two park rangers behaved like dicks there while performing boating safety inspections. They were newly assigned to Alaska and perhaps hadn't heard about their agency's kinder/gentler policy because they tried to board an elderly man's boat in a tricky part of the river, forcing him to make a landing at gunpoint, and tackled and arrested him when he did. Pretty much the whole state is up in arms about this and watching closely how the judge rules in the case.

Stabenow seems to take a benign view of the NPS and has a sympathetic reoccuring character who is the park superintendant. Farmen takes the opposite view, painting the service as tyrannical and its rangers as hired thugs. In my own novel-in-progress I have two ranger characters, one of whom embodies the new partnership park philosophy and the other, his supervisor, who espouses the old jerk-around-the-inholders policy.

Here's a view of my back while standing out in the subdivision. Jenn seemed impressed by the number of mosquitoes I attracted moments after taking off my rain jacket. This was a particularly buggy trip. The head nets provide relief even if you use deet repellent (which I don't).

I suspect that the word "subdivision" carries a lot of connotative baggage for most people. It evokes the suburbs, architectural conformity, urban sprawl, and the like. Out here subdivision is still a bunch of lines on paper. Here's a view from one of the subdivision's main streets.

I'll be putting up more pix soon.

Off to the bush

2011-07-02T13:24:00.003-08:00

We are inholders in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest park in the national system. The park sits in the southeastern corner of the Alaskan mainland and bumps up against the Canadian border. It's a 13 million-acre swatch of mostly wild land and boreal forest, with mountains, glaciers, vulcanos, an ice field the size of Rhode Island, gold, copper, bears, moose, lynx, dall sheep, and only a few dozen year-round human residents. We're going to spend about a week on our lot, clearing and prepping for a cabin. I'll try to get some good snaps.

Since deciding to set a novel here, I have run across a couple of other writers who have already done so. In the case of Dana Stabenow, a cool 18 novels. It's the setting for her famous Kate Shugak mystery series. I'm only reading my second book in the series, and I can tell that it's not the park I know.

I've only recently heard about another novel set in the park, a first novel by an Alaskan author. More on that when I've had a chance to look at it.

The photo above is from the McCarthy footbridge. It shows Bonanza Ridge. To the left is Root Glacier. On the lower right flank of the ridge is a cluster of roofs belonging to the old Kennecott Copper Mine. (Double click the image to see a larger size.)

What I Am Working On--Part 2

2011-06-27T10:11:00.002-08:00

I’ll tell you as much about my novel-in-progress as I dare.

There must be at least a few good reasons to say nothing about one’s current project. I’m not sure if all of them are legit. Some are surely superstitions.

(By the way, confession is a powerful practice, especially for someone raised old-school Catholic like me. In my May 19 post, I confessed to having two stubborn superstitions. One of them was feeling compelled to read the entire Help Wanted section in the local paper each Sunday so that I never have to apply for a job again. The following Sunday morning, I sat down with my 20-oz., 4-shot Americano and a copy of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner at the coffee shop and realized how stupid the whole Help Wanted ritual was. I didn’t feel the need to read it then, and didn’t, and I haven’t read it since. Just like that, another flea crushed.)

(As for my last remaining superstition, I have no desire to reveal or eliminate it. It’s rather homey and sweet.)

When someone asks me (and I think this holds true for other authors) what I’m working on, I usually reply in very broad terms, such as, “on my third novel,” or “on my latest science fiction novel.” I avoid detail. I never reveal the plot.

I do this for these reasons:

When I talk about a work-in-progress, the talking seems to dissipate the story’s energy, leaving not enough juice for the difficult work of getting it down on paper.
Fear of having my ideas ripped off by revealing too much.
Even small details can give too much away.
Talking about something like a plot or character can “lock it in,” sometimes too soon.
At some point the whole project might implode and I stop working on it (it’s happened). Wouldn’t exactly like to do this live online.
It’s bad luck.

In my May post, I brought you up to Nov. 2010. What have I been doing since?

I have been working on a novel that pretty much combines the essences of most of my recent “failed” projects. Fresh from the composting heap of my mind to yours.

There is a working title, but it gives too much away, and I can’t say it.

I can say that it’s my first Alaskan novel. It seems impossible to me, but I’m fast approaching my 40th anniversary as an Alaskan. I guess I’m gaining a long view of the place. You’d be surprised at the variety of stories you can collect about a place over a course of 40 years. And it’s about time I get some of that down on paper. About time I laid claim to this wild territory in my memory. So I’m setting the story in a very special corner of Alaska, a place I’m going to visit in about ten days--the largest National Park in America. (more on that later)

It’s also my first E.T. story ever. I’ve never published a story with an alien character. As one who sides with the great, late Mundane SF movement, I dismissed alien contact as improbable and thus not mundane enough to write about. That’s why I never invented an alien character, only posthuman clones and sentient AIs.

These days I think, why the hell not? Aliens are fun, and they have traditionally served a number of purposes in SF fiction (more on that later), one of which is: Alien as Foil. That is, through interaction with non-human sentients, we gain insight into what qualities make us human.

This seems especially fitting, since a major theme of this book is . . .

. . . the neurological basis of Faith. I have not given up my desire to explore in fiction a cool idea I have about religious faith. What better way to speak to that issue than aliens in the Alaskan bush? (more on that later too, I guess).

S and T Palin may or may not play a role in this book. Probably only a cameo. I don’t know. Maybe they provide the plot a McGuffin.

Although I’ve been working on this book since Dec. 2010, and despite about 400 longhand pages of a first draft and 120 pages of notes, much of the story is still obscured in the mist of possibility. I simply do not know what happens. Every day or so, another puzzle is solved, and a rush of invention follows. At this point I have a good idea where the story is headed, but I don’t know how it gets there, and am making everything up as I go along. When I get stuck and can’t proceed, sometimes it means that I’ve gone off track, and I have to back up to firmer ground. I delete whole chapters or entire characters or story threads. I go back to the last sure text and restart from there. This is the way I seem to work, rather than outlining the whole story before beginning to write.

What else do I dare reveal? Here’s one. There’s a dog character, a mixed German shepherd named Crissy Lou. Her owners, in Glennallen, Alaska, were high bidders in a fundraising auction for 49 Writers last year. For their winning bid, Crissy Lou gets to do a cameo part in the novel. Well, she’s in there already, and it looks like she may possibly play a plot-driving role. Maybe a heroic part like Lassie. I don’t know, but it could very well happen.

stay tuned for more--

Book Pirates

2011-06-15T18:22:00.002-08:00

What to do about pirates?

I have Google Alerts set on the titles of my books so that whenever they appear anywhere on the open internet, Google sends me an email with a link. This is a good way to track reviews, mentions, and buzz. It’s also a good way to track piracy. Lately I’ve been getting notified that ten or so pirate sites are offering a download of an audible version of my second novel, Mind Over Ship. As far as I know, no legitimate audible version of this book has ever been produced. I can’t imagine that some fan has made his or her own recording (14.5 hours unabridged) and posted it somewhere for download, but I can’t think of any other alternative. I’ve got to wonder if it’s professionally made or is doing more harm than good to my book’s reputation. And why would someone do something like this without asking or telling me?

As an added bonus, Counting Heads, the pirated download, is getting increased traffic as well.

As I said in an earlier post, I’m not a big fan of the “open culture” which says that everything digital wants to be free. But I, myself, read way more books that I check out of the public library than ones I pay $24.95 for. So I don’t know how to react to the piracy of my work. It’s not like authors can go on tour like musicians to recoup the value of our labor with paid live performances. (And please buy a CD on your way out.) To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, the enemy of a writer is not piracy; it’s obscurity. This is especially true when everybody and his cousin thinks he’s a writer and Amazon and B&N (and others) make it so easy to self-publish. So I guess I should be happy that someone felt moved enough by my novel to spend 14 hours reading it into a microphone. I can only hope they did a bang-up job.

Exploring the Intertubes

2011-06-09T18:06:00.002-08:00

With my return to blogging, I am trying to formulate some “big picture” understanding of what the internet is today and where I can best apply my energies. In this endeavor, I have asked you, my readers, for input, and I have received some valuable leads and insights here and in private emails. I have also scoured the new book section at the local library for titles on the topic. I found three: Pull, The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform your Business, by David Siegel; You Are Not a Gadget, a Manifesto by Jaron Lanier; and Say Everything, How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, by Scott Rosenberg. Since this is the public library, “new books” tend to be six or more months old by the time they hit the shelves, and, indeed, these books were published a year or two ago. Which is a long time in the ongoing transformation of the Web, but hey, it’s a start.

The first one, being a book on how to improve one’s business, I can dispatch rather quickly. The panacea for business success is--metadata. Pay attention to the particular metadata that your industry attaches to your product or service, and you too can harness the power of the semantic web. I read the chapter about the publishing industry and pretty much ignored the rest. I learned a few things about marketing in traditional publishing, but not much I can use.

The second one is the chewiest of the three. Lanier was an early developer of virtual reality and has toiled in Silicon Valley for a long time. His views on software engineers and the early days of the personal computer are interesting, as is his take on the state of the internet today. It’s a book I’d probably have to read again to fully understand. But who has time to read anything more than once these days? And I fear I might not be able to understand it better with a second reading anyway. That’s because of Lanier’s writing style. It’s rather choppy. Ideas are introduced and dropped without, first, an adequate explanation of what he means by them and, second, any way to tie them into a larger picture. Even words like “person” get short shrift. (“Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.” Yeah, right. So why’d you bring it up?) Also, he likes to illustrate abstractions with more abstractions. I’m not sure there is a point to the book other than the impression that Lanier is disgruntled and slightly wary of the state of technology today.

But I almost did get something valuable from his manifesto that relates to my novel-in-progress. That is, in disparaging the Web 2.0 and its “cybernetic totalists” with their vaunted open culture, Creative Commons anti-context file sharing, and derivative mashups of a previous generation’s work, he implies that there is an opposing point of view. I, myself, have looked askance at the whole open culture paradigm (hey, I want to be paid for my work), but I didn’t know there could be a counter position, other than the old, dead, litigious rearguard of the music industry (suing grandmothers for pirated music on their hard drives). So I eagerly read on in hope of discovering what this other camp might be, only to be left in the dark. Likewise, he speaks of the Singularity as being a religious tenant of the cybernetic totalists. I have taken a contrarian POV toward the Singularity in my two novels (not that anyone noticed), and I touch on it again in my current book. So I was keen to hear how a modern technologist might argue against it. But again I was disappointed. Lanier seems to be a dualist at heart, though not necessarily a theist. He seems to be saying that humans are the exceptional animal; though a part of Nature, they participate in the ineffable (i.e. they are “spiritual but not religious”). Might as well go to a UU meeting.

The third book, Say Everything, was the one most germane to my investigation, and from it I’ve drawn several valuable conclusions. First, I’m probably not a blogger, and this blog may not be the best way for me to reach my PR goals. Blogging is a form of writing in itself. This is not to say there’s a single approach to blogging. There are three, more or less, and there may be more variations in the future. One of the original impulses in blogging was the first-person, self-revelatory, diarist approach. Ordinary people were suddenly presented the tools necessary to publish their thoughts about everything and anything to their friends and the world at large. No more gatekeepers. Rag on your employer, reveal family secrets, obsess about your body parts, chronicle the family vacation. Whatever you like. When I asked my readers for feedback about what you’d like to see in my blog, one of the replies I got was to steer away from this True Confessions/home-movie type of blogging style.

A second approach, exemplified by the excellent Boing Boing blog, is to make a digest of links to interesting stories on other sites.

A third is to offer up a running commentary on a particular topic, like politics, religion, collecting sports memorabilia, or whatever, usually with a highly personal POV. This type has been commercialized, as with Gawker. When attached to a news/magazine site, like Salon, HuffPost, and the Atlantic, they take the form of essay or commentary.

None of which I’m interested in doing. Why? Because it takes time. It has taken me two days to write each of these few recent posts (except for the previous one on foreign releases). That’s two days I should have been writing fiction. Also because it’s not my preferred form of writing. I am totally wrapped up in writing the long fiction form--the novel. The hours I spend working on a novel each day make me feel good. I think that my mind is especially shaped to excel at novel writing, that novels can be things of lasting value. Having my name on a finished novel is fulfilling. So, that’s what I should focus on. And with any luck, the novel form will survive in this ever-accelerating world. Short stories might not. They’re in the same length niche as blogs and other forms of web reading. But the long form is a form unto itself, and people like to sink themselves into unfamiliar universes every now and then.

So why am I keeping this blog? Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll quit. I laid out my goal for it a few posts ago. Traditional publishing is dead. I may have to publish my next book myself, and if I do, the one skill I lack is promotion. There are 300,000 or so new books released in this country every year; who’s going to even hear of mine? And with the gates to epublishing thrown wide open, there’s bound to be two and three times that number soon. YouTube made everyone a videographer. The Kindle and Nook are making everyone an author. You can download thousands of books for free.

OK, I’ll keep updating this blog, at least until I find something better. One of the things a fellow suggested in the comments is that I start a forum. I’ve given that a lot of thought, and I like the idea. Not that I would start a forum myself. I don’t think I could pull it off. Rather, I’ll look around the web and find the most popular science fiction forum going, and I’ll join that. More on that later.

Where do you go to chat about science fiction? Let me know.

The photo at the top is a demonic moose that visited me last December.

Foreign News

2011-05-28T15:38:00.002-08:00

I don't think it's possible to run into a German born after WWII who doesn't speak flawless English. For that reason, I believe, none of my work has ever been translated into German—until now. So, it is with great pleasure that I announce the release next week of a collection of my most popular short fiction by Golkonda Verlag in Berlin.

Another translation has just come out, this one in French. It's the quarterly (I think) anthology of stories previously published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. It includes French translations of stories by Paolo Bacigaupi, Robert Reed, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and others. My own contribution is "Osama Phone Home," or "Oussama téléphone maison." I announced on this blog that that was one of the stories I would self-pub as an ebook, but a few days later, the Dark Prince bit the big one, and I changed my mind. I figured the story had seen its day. But it's nice to see it get a final outing in France.

Closer to home, my novel Counting Heads has, at long last, been released by Tor as an ebook.

What I've Been Working On: Part 1

2011-05-19T16:26:00.009-08:00

I feel pretty lame to promise to keep readers informed about my current work and then to produce no updates for two weeks. The fact of the matter is that I came down with a case of viral meningitis. Boy, does that knock you on your butt! I NEVER want to get that again. I'll spare you the gory details except to describe it as like having the worst pounding migraine headaches in your life while you also have the flu, and to spend so much time on your back you herniate a lumbar disk and for days and nights are unable to find any comfortable position standing, sitting, or lying. The whole business lasts 14 days. Besides the pain, the worst part for me was that I wasn’t able to write or do anything for two weeks and may not have the creative stamina for another couple of days. On most days the most I could accomplish was to check my email; on some days I couldn't even do that.

I’m not telling you this to earn your sympathy (well, maybe a little) but to encourage everyone to cultivate the habit of disinfecting shopping cart handles before you use them and to never touch the “T” on your face (eyes, nose, mouth) without first washing your hands. Seriously, people!

I want to thank my friends here who found out what was going on and checked up on me daily and who, along with my daughter and son-in-law, helped ferry me to my appointments and keep me supplied with food, water, and stuff.

I titled this entry “What I’ve Been Working On: Part One.” In it I will reveal, much more than I have on any public forum, what I’ve written since 2008 when I delivered the final draft of Mind Over Ship to Tor. This will explain why you haven’t seen anything new from me since that book. In Part Two I will reveal to you as much as I dare about what I am currently working on, my brand new, hopefully outrageous, poignant, and darkly humorous novel.

OK, first off, unfortunately, I have to disappoint some of you. Some of you think that I’m working on the third installment in my Counting Heads series. I’m not. Except for a few notes on the next book, I am taking a hiatus from that whole universe. I think you have got to agree with me that for all its good points, that universe is unrelentingly bleak. And if it was bleak for the reader, just imagine what it was like for me to dwell in it for so long. As you may know, much of the writing process takes place not while the author is actually writing but while doing other things. The ideas don't conform to a schedule. They act spookily, at least in my case, like an obsession. I started developing the universe and characters in 1993, with five short stories, starting with “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.” I didn’t start Counting Heads, the novel, till the winter of 1999, when “The Wedding Album” came out. So by the time I wrapped up Mind Over Ship in 2008, I had occupied that world of slugs and nasties and aff conspiracies for 15 years. I decided I needed a reality break, especially since I had other stories I wanted to tell. Will I ever go back to Book 3? I honestly can’t say.
The Holy Family
In 2008, I started a novel titled The Holy Family. From its title you can glean that its major theme was religion. As an atheist (proud and loud), religion has always fascinated me. As some of you may know, I was raised a Catholic in a big family (7 sibs) mostly in the Midwest. At the age of 14, I entered the minor seminary for the priesthood (a cloistered high school). What I learned there was probably the opposite of what they thought they were teaching me. That is, I discovered that religion is a wholly human invention, with no divine involvement whatsoever. This revelation matured over the years and on my 19th birthday I renounced my religion. Still, I wasn’t an atheist. I set off on a 30-year journey of spiritual exploration, from Eastern mysteries to New Age and create-your-own-reality silliness. It took that long before I could say that I am free of all the fleas of faith, except for a few harmless superstitions. (Such as, I read the entire help wanted section in the Sunday paper. When people ask me why I explain that it's a good way to take a pulse on a community. The real reason is because if I do, I'll never have to apply for a job again. Fortunately, it’s not a large section in the Fairbanks paper.)

Yet, after all my exploration, I understood nothing. I had no difficulty refutiating religion (to use my ex-gov’s neologism), but what about faith? And why do nearly 90% of my fellow Americans cling to religion? Could everyone (but you, my dear readers) be stupid? And not just Americans, but all cultures in all of history? At one point I concluded that people weren’t stupid, per se, but psychologically immature. After all, if I could fight my way out of the papist brier patch, why couldn’t they fight their own culture's fairy tales? I know how elitist this must sound, and by 2008 it was no longer adequate an explanation for me. So I began to research and read all the “militant atheist” books by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, et al, but I felt they were barking up the wrong tree. They were largely engaged in polemics, not analysis. It seemed to me they were trying to browbeat a world of right-handed people into becoming left-handed, and none of their strictly biological arguments moved me much. (But as a member of their choir, I enjoyed reading them anyway.) I read other theories; the ecstasy of nuns at prayer or theta waves during meditation seemed unrelated to faith. The God Gene theory has long been refutiated (I seem to like that word.) Even the book’s author hesitated to claim there was an actual gene, and it was his publisher who gave the book that title over his objection.

Then, while I was reading a popular science journal article at Barnes & Noble about a recent discovery in neurobiology, everything started falling into place. I suddenly understood why faith is so prevalent in the human animal. What a kick in the head! The explanation was similar to something Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion, but it took it farther than he did and, from my readings, no one has quite come up with it. I could easily be wrong, but it may be an original idea. Or at least an uncommon one. (Though my big idea might be false, it passes the test for a good science fiction story--plausibility.) And it did not denigrate faith or people of faith, or non-believers, for that matter.

I literally plowed into my story, which I set in a mixed-faith family in the generic Midwestern landscape of my youth. But, as some of you who know me can guess, I wasn’t satisfied with writing a mere book. The Kindle had recently been released, and I envisioned my new novel to be wholly digital. Also I knew that my agent, Ralph, had a Kindle of his own. He had started loading his clients’ manuscripts on it to eliminate the burdensome reams of paper he used to carry on his daily commute between Manhattan and Long Island. So in 2009, I bought a Kindle. My book would have illustrations and internal and external links. It would have an attached website where fans could pin their own fan versions to the text at appropriate places (controlled by me so as not to distract from my story) and download monthly updates to the novel. The genre wasn’t exactly science fiction but fictionalized science. I wrote most of the “scientific” articles that under gird the story, but I also linked to actual articles in popular magazines like New Scientist and Nature. It was great.

My plan was to write and polish part 1 (of 4 parts) and send it in Kindle format to Ralph. This took me an entire year. I sent it off and nervously waited for his reply. When it came, I was devastated. He wrote, “I do not understand what this is you sent me.” And I hadn’t even revealed the most outrageous part. That is, the internal illustrations would gradually take over from the text, and the entire 4th part would transform into a comic novel. This was not a gimmick; the story required it.

Ralph’s disapproval was not enough to sink the project. What did sink it in the end was a niggling realization in the back of my mind that I had stepped over the line from fiction to didacticism. I wasn’t spinning a yarn; I was giving a lecture and pounding my fist on the lectern. I had my big idea; but I didn’t yet have my story. So sad. I put it in a drawer and dreamt about what might have been.

And, no, I’m not going to reveal my big idea. Read the upcoming “What I’m Working On: Part 2.”

What Choice Did We Have?
Somewhere around this time, a respected editor asked if I had a short story for an anthology of his. I had only one in the pipeline, and I agreed to push it along. It was of novelette length and eventually took the title “What Choice Did We Have?” It was a fantasy, my first. It was also set in my generic Midwestern city. I sent him my finished piece, and he rejected it.

Some years ago at a con, someone told me there was a rumor going around that if a story of mine was rejected even once, I abandoned it. I’m sorry to say that the rumor is mostly true. I realize that that’s no way to try to earn a living writing fiction, and that’s why I still live in a crummy cabin and drive a 20-yr-old pickup. At least I have the freedom to write what I want, which I believe is at least as important as money. Anyway, although he had suggestions on how to improve it, I withdrew it from consideration. He wrote back encouraging me to revise it and that he’d like to see it again. I thought, what the hell, why not? I revised it, completely changing the ending to make it more clear what I was after. In the end, he rejected it a second time but assured me that another editor was bound to snap it up.

I do believe it’s good enough that another editor would take it, and if not, I could self-pub it, as I’m doing with my older stories. But I deep-sixed it anyway. There’s a thread running through it that now makes me uncomfortable. The thread is so essential to the plot that there’s no way I can think of to extract it. And so the story sits, completely finished and polished and sparkly and new, occupying a few hundred KB of hard drive, and it will never see the light of day. So sad. But I am master of my own career, even if it's a leaky dinghy.

Queen Sarah

You might get a kick out of this next one. In late 2009, I was attending an educator’s conference event for authors and having drinks with authors from around the state. I opined, “You know what would make a million dollars? A counter-autobiography of Sarah Palin.” Her own fictional autobiography, Going Rogue, was about to come out. People around the table chuckled and went on to other topics. But the next day, one of them quietly approached me and asked when could we begin. We began at once, laying out our collaboration agreement at the banquet table.

Here what was going through my head. I’d never particularly wanted to collaborate with another writer, with a few exceptions. One being, to work on a project I wouldn’t consider doing myself or was a newbie at (like a screenplay). And this one fit the bill. We were both competent writers, and while I enjoyed the polishing process, she could draft at least twice as fast as me. Writing is usually such a lonely process, I thought it might be fun to work as a team, albeit living in two different towns.

Also, and this may sound petty and vain to some of you, though I’ve been publishing quality fiction from Fairbanks for 18 years, up here I’m not actually considered to be an “Alaskan” author. I’m not asking to be made state writer laureate or anything, but geesh, it would be nice to be recognized as an Alaskan writer whose topic just happens not to be Alaska, or her land, people, history, beauty, or wildlife but rather an Alaskan writer whose subject is the attack of brain-melting nano-goo. I might be overreacting but it’s a personal pet peeve of mine. This book would fix all that in one swoop, even though we planned on releasing it under pseudonyms.

We set ourselves a two-month deadline to come up with a killer idea. The counter-autobiography fell by the wayside early on. Going Rogue hadn’t come out yet, and it was possible that we’d be unable to come up with anything wackier than her own words. Whatever it was to be, it would be political satire, using our knowledge of the state and current affairs. We worked hard, bouncing encrypted emails back and forth every day. We followed the anti-Palin blogs, read and annotated Going Rogue (what a chore), tried formats like in Stuff White People Like. (Entry: Wasilla, the whiz stop on the way to Denali Park) Despite our best efforts, at the end of two months, we didn’t come up with an idea we had confidence in. Meanwhile, other projects were beckoning my partner, and so we dissolved the collaboration and parted on friendly terms.

I was left contemplating what I should start next. Two things occurred around this time. Another writer friend, this one in Fairbanks, told me in passing that she had an entire novel on the gov finished and almost ready to go to an agent in NYC who was eagerly waiting to read it. I told her about my and the Anchorage writer’s project. We marveled at the coincidence. Secondly, I learned on the blogs that Palin was in talks with a cable network to produce a series on her life to be called Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Boy, this chapped my bum! Now she was claiming the whole state as hers? What an insult.

Back when I was writing Mind Over Ship, I watched an episode of The Apprentice and wondered how men named Donald felt about Trump appropriating their name for himself. As in “the Donald.” I thought I’d do Donalds everywhere a favor and reclaim their name for them. That’s why I named the space station line of clones, “the donalds,” and drew them as so unappealing. No Donald has yet thanked me for this, but that’s OK. It was a freebie. Now my half-term governor was claiming my entire state. That was intolerable.

While brainstorming about my next project, I found I couldn’t wean myself off the Palin blogs. They were deliciously vile and informative, and I continued to browse them every day, mainly Palingates.blogspot.com, which is a compendium of the Queen’s many sins. (I realize that by now I may have alienated all Christians and Palin supporters reading this blog. Sorry, the migraines made me do it.) A couple of months later, the Fairbanks writer emailed me to say that her agent asked for revisions to her Palin novel. We met at a coffee shop to discuss her novel, and before long we agreed to collaborate on a completely new Palin novel. I shouldn't have done it. I was learning that collaboration between writers, as opposed to artists in completely different fields, like writer and illustrator, is an iffy proposition, much like a marriage. The Anchorage author, with several collaborative novels under her belt, was able to guide us through the rocky patches, and we emerged on the other side unscathed. I knew in the back of my head that the Fairbanks author and I might have less than complementary writing styles, maybe even incompatible ones, but in my eagerness to save Alaska, I ignored any warning bells and jumped right in.

Our strategy was to write a realistic novel, an alternate biography, but with a snarky tone. Our model, except for the tone, was the 2009 bestseller, The American Wife, which is a fictionalized biography of Laura Bush. As in that book, all the names would be changed, and we invented a new Wasilla that was a composite of various Alaskan small towns we knew well. Thus we “owned” it in a literary sense and could write about it as experts. As in my earlier train wreck, THF, we would draft and polish Part 1 (of 4 parts) and start shopping for an agent. Since my agent didn’t like THF, I didn’t think he’d want anything to do with this one either, but we would give him a crack at it.

I was totally engaged in the work. I was having fun, a reason to jump out of bed each morning. And we made decent progress. Unfortunately, our personal differences started to show up and interfere. Still we mushed on. It took us nine whole months, but we produced a good reader draft of part 1. But just as we were passing it around to our first readers for feedback, the collaboration imploded from shear incompatibility. Probably my fault more than hers. I guess I’m not easy to work with, to put it mildly. So we quit, it never went to the agent, and that was that. Palin won again, dang her; Alaska was still in peril.

That pretty much catches us up to November, 2010. Failed literary masterpieces: 3. David: 0. Time elapsed: 3 years. But wait! Is that a phoenix I see rising from the ashes? Is a new day dawning? All I can say is: Watch the skies, my friends. Stay tuned and look for “What I’ve Been Working On: Part 2.’ Coming soon on this blog.

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And now for some crass PR. If you are enjoying my new commitment to keeping you in the loop, why don’t you press the Subscribe To link in the sidebar so you don’t miss an episode (even if I do). And if you have friends who appreciate my work, or you think might like to read me, for God’s sake, tell them about this blog. Sorry if that sounded too strident. It’s the migraines.

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And now for some really crass PR. You can’t have all read my Playboy story by now, “She Was Good--She Was Funny," but the Kindle store stats say you’re not buying the ebook version (and they know who you are). What’s the matter? Don’t you have an e-reader yet? Are you dwelling in the past? Today's financial section says that Kindle announced that since April 1, they've sold more ebooks than paper, even when the free ebooks are not counted. If you’re waiting for the Nook version, that was delayed by my illness but is coming very soon. Also you can download free Kindle and Nook apps for your phones, tablets, and computers. True, the story isn’t science fiction, but it’s a hoot, and it’s set in Interior Alaska! Not Sarah Palin’s Alaska but in David Marusek’s Alaska. Where else can you find such world class entertainment for only 99 cents? Anna Nicole Smith was on the original cover, for crying out loud. It was translated into Dutch, and Drew Barrymore was on that cover. It’s cosmopolitan, people. The protagonist was a Brit--in Alaska! On the Italian cover was Shannen Doherty with doves perched on her knees! What more can you ask? Don’t do it for me; do it for Alaska.

I think I need a nap.

Some Feedback to your comments . . .

2011-05-03T11:11:00.002-08:00

I want to thank everyone who took the time to respond to my recent post. Your feedback came in the comments on this blog, directly to me via email, and on Facebook. By far the most responses came via FB, and so I will definitely have to keep it in the loop.

Here are some things I’ve gleaned. I would appreciate any further feedback y’all can give me about them or other thoughts you have. I’m trying to tailor my PR efforts to your preferences.

1) It was suggested I start a forum so that fans can discuss my work on their own with occasional input from me. I think this is a great idea, but I’ve got to wonder if there are enough fans out there who would participate. Amazon offers a forum feature on my Author’s Page, and no one takes advantage of it. I’d hate to launch a forum that only collects cobwebs. Anyone out there dying to discuss my work?
2) Here’s an important one: what should I share on this blog? One person encouraged me to share my wit here (and referenced the witticisms in my books to demonstrate that I do indeed possess wit). But another respondent said about the opposite, to steer clear of opinion and keep my witticisms IN my books, not on my blog. That leaves me wondering how much of my life and thoughts to share here. Another person said she appreciates my posts about Alaska. Everyone’s interested in hearing about Alaska, right?
3) Twitter. People follow Twitter. It was suggested I learn how to use hashmarks. I’d love to. Can anyone explain them to me? BTW, if you want to follow me there, my addy is http://twitter.com/davidmarusek.
4) Someone said I should consider using a fan page on Facebook, as opposed to a personal one. Anyone got any ideas about that? My FB addy is http://www.facebook.com/davidmarusek. BTW, I don’t play Farmville or any other games or stuff there. I just don’t have the time/interest. Does that make me a bad person?
5) Someone said I should link this blog to more places, such as Goodreads. I’m not sure how to do that. Blogger has Twitter and FB buttons, which makes it easy. Assuming I can figure out how to link elsewhere, where should I link to? Where do you go to get your book/author news?

Well, that’s all for now. Any feedback is appreciated.

David Wakes Up!

2011-04-30T13:56:00.003-08:00

The datelines on my most recent posts show that I haven’t kept you, my readers, or the world at large informed about my life or work. In large part that’s because of my need for privacy. Also because I don’t believe people, even my readers, are much interested in how I live my life. And finally because I’m not really convinced that social media and self-promotion have much of a positive effect on my career. Some SF writers seem to bubble over with news, opinions, and facts and still have time to put out a fairly decent novel a year. I’m not one of those writers. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. Nothing ever happens, so there’s no news (with a few notable exceptions. See below). I’m opinionated, sure, but don’t consider my opinions especially worth airing, except when they come out of the mouths of my fictional characters. As to social media, I just don’t get it. Call me a social grinch, but I’d rather spend five minutes breathing the same air with someone than an hour reading their updates online. As to promotion, I’ve always felt that that was my publisher’s job. After all, they take 85% of every dollar in sales of my books.

But that’s all about to change. Why? For two reasons. First, my longtime agent, Ralph Vicinanza, died unexpectedly last November. I was lucky to have representation by a person of his caliber. He steered the course of my first novel, Counting Heads, and I will be forever in his debt. Now I am faced with decisions of how to chart my future course, which leads to . . .

Ebook publishing has exploded. Ebooks had been a tantalizing possibility for years, but no one knew how to bring them to the market. Amazon changed that with the Kindle. There had been ebook reading devices before, but Amazon put theirs together with the largest online bookstore in the world, making it easy and relatively cheap to find, download, and read books. IMO, the Kindle has done for books what iTunes did for music. And with Barnes & Noble and Apple jumping into the game, it seems clear that ebooks are the next step in publishing. Moreover, e-publishing has the potential to cut out the middleman, the traditional publishers, from the process. In five years, if such giants as Macmillan and HarperCollins are still in business, that business will be unrecognizable by today’s standards. In the meantime, we authors have the ability, like indie musicians, to cater to our fans directly.

Of course, that means we’re responsible for getting the word out ourselves and to build and cultivate our own fan base. In other words, self-pubbing equals self-promoting, and at long last I accept the challenge.

What does that mean? First off, it means that I’m committing myself to letting you know what’s happening with me and my work on a more timely basis than once every six months. For the last 15 years I have counted Saturdays as just another work day for writing fiction. Now, and for the foreseeable future, Saturdays will be my “social network” day. I have to admit, I still don’t know how to do it, and I’m hoping that some of you reading this can give me some hints. What’s the best way to get the word out about my fiction? Where do YOU go for news about your favorite writers? What do you want to know about me? How can I best use my time? Come on, give me a clue. I’ve had a Facebook account for years, but I never updated it, using it only as an easy way for people to find me. Now, I will at least copy these blog postings onto FB, but what else is FB good for? Do you follow Twitter? Does anyone really care to read tweets from me? What else out there should I be using?

It also means that I will begin to self-pub some of my short fiction as ebooks. I’ve already got “She Was Good—She Was Funny” up on Kindle for 99 cents. This was my second-ever published short story, and the only one that’s not science fiction. Actually, it’s a kickass story about love and murder in the Alaskan bush, and it appeared in Playboy magazine. It’s never been collected (except as a premium feature in the Subterranean collection, Getting to Know You) and is pretty much unavailable, until now. I’ll get it up on Nook next. After that I’ll do a mini-collection of three stories: “Osama Phone Home,” “A Hard Man to Surprise,” and “Timed Release.” The first of these appeared in MIT Technology Review, and the other two are flash fiction stories that appeared in the British journal Nature. These three stories have also never been collected or anthologized. They are available online but only behind a paywall. And then, if I can secure the rights, I’ll do an ebook edition of my most popular story, the novella, “The Wedding Album.”

There’s a lot of work getting all this put together. A lot of administrative hoops to jump through creating accounts, not to mention the formatting of the ebooks themselves. I’ve been forced to update a bunch of software (plus I need a new computer! I need broadband!) and to learn the finer points of .mobi and .epub formatting. More on this in coming weeks.

My big news

The biggest personal news I have to share is the fact that I’m a new grandparent! Here’s my little darling only three hours old, fresh from her water birth at home. If my daughter and son-in-law allow, I’ll be sharing more pix in future weeks.

Well that’s enough for now. But check back next week for more. I’ll tell you about the novel I’ve been working on for the last three years. And please leave comments (or send email) about things you’d like to see here.

Endeavour Award

2010-11-27T09:49:00.005-09:00

Hey there--Looks like my novel Mind Over Ship won the Endeavour Award. Very Cool.

New story out

2009-08-01T14:20:00.002-08:00

My latest "flash fiction" short story, "Hard Man to Surprise," appears as the Futures feature in this week's issue of Nature (July 30). It's an adventure in social networking in the era of designer drugs (as was my previous entry, "Timed Release." That must be a theme of mine or something). I hope you check it out.

If you are a Nature subscriber, you can read it online for free. If you're not a subscriber, you might be able to read it on your local university's server or find it in a library or on a newsstand. Otherwise, you might have to wait until December of this year when my contract allows me to make it available on other sites. I'll release both stories somewhere.

The photo above has nothing whatsoever to do with "Hard Man to Surprise." It's a detail of my license plate during my recent tour of South Central Alaska. You'll note that most of the splattered bugs are mosquitos.

Counting Heads Audiobook

2009-07-09T14:16:00.002-08:00

Counting Heads has just been released as an audiobook by Recorded Books. Looks like it's available as a download (for $28) from Audible.com, through Amazon. This is my first audiobook, and I'm pretty excited about it.

Back from Vacation

2009-07-09T13:54:00.003-08:00

I've just returned from a couple of weeks in a remote corner of Alaska. That is, in the Wrangell--St. Elias National Park and Preserve, where my family owns land in an inholder subdivision. The photo above is of my friend Rusty who accompanied me during his first visit to Alaska. He's standing in front of the Kennicott Glacier near McCarthy, which is about 10 miles from the subdivision. The old Kennecott Copper Mine can barely be seen in the background on the right.

We're going to build a cabin on our lot, and one of this summer's chores in preparation was to clean up a mess the bears made of stuff they pulled out of our storage shed. Here's a bear-mauled plastic bottle of Clairol hair conditioner. The bears found it irresistible.

New flash fiction story

2009-06-12T12:15:00.003-08:00

"Timed Release," my latest story, is in this week's issue of Nature (June 11, 2009). It's a flash fiction piece and concerns a "bachelor aid" technology I am waiting for someone to invent. I thought maybe if I got my idea into one of the world's premier science journals, maybe an enterprising chemist would see it and be inspired to work on it. I believe it would be a boon to civilization and could make some drug company a ton of money.

Dueling Interviews

2009-03-07T17:04:00.002-09:00

Two new interviews came out yesterday, one in the Alaskan writers blog, 49 Writers, and the other in the SF blog io9. This sure has been my time for interviews.

The photo above is a shot of my recent reading at Barnes & Noble in Fairbanks.

MOS Book Launch this Saturday

2009-01-29T13:52:00.002-09:00

If you're in the Fairbanks, Alaska area this Saturday afternoon, stop by Gulliver's Books on College Rd. and help me launch my second novel, Mind Over Ship. It's a science fictional romp through a scary future, and it's the sequel to my first novel, Counting Heads. I'll be there from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, and I'd love to meet all of you sf readers in Interior Alaska.

And another interview

2009-01-29T13:41:00.002-09:00

This one is in our local newspaper, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, purveyor of all the news from the mines since 1906, I think. And it's true that I worked there in the early 1980s. There were relatively few quality jobs in town in those days, especially for a young man with no skills but art. The N-M was responsible for turning my fine art into commercial art, which has provided me a steady paycheck ever since (until I quit all graphics work two years ago to devote all my time to writing).

The article and my grinning mug appeared on the front page of the newspaper. That blows me away.

If I could correct one thing, though, the term I was referring to is "fix-up." As in: He fixed up his award-winning novella into a full-length novel. I fixed-up "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" into Counting Heads.

Another Interview

2009-01-23T11:16:00.002-09:00

I was pleased to see that Mind Over Ship was designated a Sci Fi Essential book. Here's my interview.

Intervju med David Marusek

2009-01-22T11:06:00.003-09:00

Mind Over Ship is the featured Book of the Month at the premier SF bookshops in Sweden. It's all in Swedish, though, except for an interview I did with them just last week.

MIND OVER SHIP released today

2009-01-20T12:09:00.002-09:00

I am pleased to announce that my second novel, Mind Over Ship, has been released today. Hope you like it.

Broken Barrier

2009-01-11T18:31:00.002-09:00

My daughter reports via Blackberry that Getting to Know You is in the Terminal 4 bookstore at JFK. I've broken the airport bookstore barrier!

Mark your calendar

2009-01-02T14:49:00.002-09:00

Here are some dates of note:

January 20, 2009**********Mind Over Ship is released
Sat. January 31************Book launch at Gullivers
Sat. February 7************Marusek reading at Barnes & Noble

Jan. 20--Mind Over Ship goes on sale on Inauguration Day--a doubly auspicious day, a veritable two-fer.

Jan. 31--For those of you who plan to be in Fairbanks during the dead of winter, the last Saturday of January and the first of February are of special note to you. On January 31, from 2:00–4:00 pm, I'll be having a book launch at Gulliver's Books. Come on out. I'd love to see who you are.

Feb. 7--the following Saturday I'll be at the Fairbanks Barnes & Noble for a short reading at 6 pm. I'm not sure what I'll read. Maybe something from the new novel, or maybe something still in progress. I have some short stories in the mill and one of those might be fun.

Cold Snap of '08

2009-01-01T10:46:00.003-09:00

Day 6 of the Cold Snap of the winter of '08. I am counting from last Saturday, Dec. 27, when it hit 30 below and I did my weekly grocery shopping a day early. I am cabin-bound until the temperature rises above minus 20. I have enough supplies to dig in for a week, except for water. With 3 jugs (X 6 gal) I only have enough water to go 5 or 6 days, even rationed. I hope it warms up enough in the next couple of days so I can fire up the old pickup (17 years old) and set a course through the doughy ice fog to the water station. The next time I make it to Fred Meyers to shop, I'm going to buy a new water jug (giving a water run a 24-gallon payload) in order to lengthen my maximum mission duration here in cabin central.

I used to drive in any temperature, but I destroyed the engines/electronics of two vehicles in 40-below weather, and now I won't drive anywhere when it's colder than minus 20, except in emergency. This is a practical threshold, any colder and my pickup door doesn't latch, and I'd have to drive with the door open.

This cold snap is being compared to the one in 1989 when we had like two solid weeks at 40 below. I well remember that bit of weather. It got down to 55 below where we lived near the slough, and it was driving at 50 below that killed my old Saab. The thing I remember the most about the Cold Snap of '89 (I know how much this makes me sound like an old-timer) was running out of heating oil halfway through the spell and being told by my heating oil supplier that they had a 2-week waiting list for deliveries. I couldn't believe it, a company I'd purchased all my heating oil from for about 6 years told me I'd have to wait, or pay them an exorbitant "rush" charge.

I have already put in my order for an oil delivery here. It's a different company, of course, but I still have to wait a week. At least I planned for it this time. I can go through 200 gallons from Jan 1 through Feb 28, the so-called dead of winter up here. This cabin is a leaky tent, and I used to happily burn oil back when it cost $1 per gallon. But my first 100 gallons this winter cost $425, and it's long burned up. The price of the coming delivery will be $222. Much better, but low prices won't last.

I never thought I'd live in this cabin for this long, and it is so small (16' x 24') that I have never seriously considered putting in a woodstove. A woodstove would claim major floorspace. But this fall I helped a friend cut and haul a couple of cords of firewood off my property. I have 4 acres here, and there is a LOT of deadfalls. In fact, I figure it would take me 3 or 4 years to use up all the dead wood on my lot. With heating oil at $4.25 a gallon, here I am sitting on a renewable resource large enough to heat my home (with a little healthy elbow grease) for free. So, come March that'll be my home improvement project--an EPA-approved woodstove I can bask next to.

Now Twittering

2008-12-30T11:34:00.002-09:00

I'm trying out the Twittering even though I don't have a smart phone. Look at the Twitter sidebar to the right.

Paperback release

2008-12-30T11:10:00.003-09:00

The del Rey paperback edition of my story collection, Getting to Know You, is officially released today! It's a handsome little book. Great for reading on trains and planes. It even comes in a Kindle version. This is my first outing with del Rey, an imprint of Random House, and I'm curious what kind of job they do selling it. Let me know in the comments if you see this book on shelves and where (indy or chain book store, airport, grocery/convenience store, and so on). I like the cover art even though it's not especially sci-fi-ish. Perhaps they are angling for a broader readership? Lots of cool jacket blurbing.

Open auction--Pet Cameo

2008-12-11T12:31:00.004-09:00

It has belatedly occurred to me to inform y'all that I have a Pet Cameo auction still going on for one more day. It's over at the Help Vera site on LiveJournal.

Welcome to the HelpVera fundraiser and charity auction. We are trying to help Vera Nazarian, a speculative writer, publisher, and all-around wonderful person to save her house from foreclosure.

Vera's a friend and colleague of mine who has fallen on some rough times and apparently some good friends of hers took it upon themselves to do an online auction fundraiser. Hundreds of people have participated, and the target goal of $11,000 has been met and exceeded.

That's very cool and I'm very pleased for Vera. But let's not forget that many of the auctions are still going on! including mine! SF treasures are being sold right now for a good cause. If you're interested in some eclectic SF-themed goods and services, you've got only a day or two to place bids.

The things being offered and bid upon are mind-blowing. I was expecting a lot of books in this auction, but custom poems, cookies, custom jewelery, tarot readings, handbooks, pet cameos, copyediting... it goes on and on.

My own lot is the pet cameo, and it has only a day or so to go. It closes on Sat. Dec. 13 at 11:47 am, one week from its timestamp. I am selling one pet cameo in an upcoming story or novel. Here's how I described it for the auction:

You can immortalize your pet in a literary work!

For awhile now I've been offering pet cameos at auction for local non-profits. My novel, Mind Over Ship (Tor, Jan. 20 2009) includes two dogs who each fetched over $100 for the Fairbanks Symphony Association auction. The auction winner sends me a photo and a little bio sketch of their pet, and I'll fit the pet by name and description into an upcoming story or novel. In the past some of these animals have taken part at critical plot points!

For Vera's auction I'll donate one pet cameo. Can be pretty much any kind of animal. If it lives with you I should be able to fit it in. (Alternatively, I can do a cameo of your favorite boat, car, country estate, etc. No living people please).

A story I'm currently working on has a pivotal role played by a dog, and it's available for bidding. Other animals may have to wait a story or book or two to fit in. If a story or novel goes unpublished, I'll include your pet in the next until it is published. Minimum bid is $35.00.

As of today, Thurs, the high bid is $70, which frankly is a steal. If you're interested in casting your pet into literary history, you can make a bid until Saturday, Dec. 13 at 11:47 am, 2008. Sorry I didn't alert you sooner. I need an assistant around here.

Here's how you make a bid. Just go here.

I don't know if they make you join LJ or not in order to bid, but if you have any difficulty contact the auction manager Josh Guppiecat.

All pets are immortal, but sometimes it's nice to make it official.

Getting to Know You--Again!

2008-11-25T12:25:00.002-09:00

In the windup to the release of Mind Over Ship, and the subsidiary afterlife of Counting Heads, I have been all too forgetful of my other child, the collection of stories Getting To Know You, which comes out from del Rey on December 30. Others have not, including the preeminent SF writer, reviewer, and encyclopedia editor, John Clute. He published a review of GTKY in yesterday's Sci-Fi Weekly that blows me away. He actually makes me sound like someone who knows what he's doing (when the fact is I have to read reviews to discover that). Anyway, it's humbling. Check it out.

Counting Heads in Romania

2008-11-24T16:17:00.003-09:00

I am excited to see this come out, the Romanian edition of my first novel. I can't speak a word of Romanian, but I'm confident that this is a good translation because the translators, Cristina and Stefan Guidoveanu, sent me lists of questions to clarify terms and ideas. I usually inform foreign publishers that I'm available for such inquiries, but the Guidoveanus are the first to take me up on it.

Second Starred Review for MOS

2008-11-05T09:42:00.003-09:00

The current issue of Publisher's Weekly has a starred review for Mind Over Ship. (If you go there to read it, scroll halfway down the page to the SF/Fantasy/Horror section.) Since my first published stories, I have tried to take the moderating attitude of not getting too excited over good reviews or too bummed over bad ones. This review is very good, but what pleases me most in it is the mention of my--ahem--moments of "perfect prose." Hell yes! I labor long polishing those sentences and paragraphs. It's probably the most fun part of the process for me.

The review also makes this observation: "While newcomers might wish for a short prologue or a glossary, those omissions don't significantly detract." It's a relief to hear this from a reviewer, but I'm still anxious to provide some kind of synopsis of Counting Heads here and elsewhere (see the previous posting to this blog). So, if you've read CH and would like to take a stab at writing a summary, please do so. Email it to me. Don't make me write one myself, please, because my head is so full of early drafts, revisions, deleted scenes, alternate scenes, and abandoned threads and characters, that I have a hard time remembering how the final book came out. No joke.

Can you assist?

2008-10-23T19:24:00.002-08:00

In January 2009, when Mind Over Ship is released, more than three years will have passed since the release of Counting Heads. That's a long time to go between two installments of a series, and I expect that even careful readers of CH might need a refresher in order to better enjoy the sequel. I didn't provide a thumbnail recap of CH in MOS, but now I'm thinking I need one. Problem is, I just don't seem to be able to write one. I always have the hardest time doing synopses of my own work. I'm just hopeless at it, really. So, I am making an appeal to anyone who wants to write one for me. If you'd like to give it a shot, try to limit it to about 500 to 1000 words, and don't worry about spoilers. It'll be recommended for people who have already read CH, so spoilers won't matter. Cover all the important characters and events. Email it to me as an attached text file, I'll put the best couple of them up here and on my web site with your attribution.

COUNTING HEADS to be an audiobook

2008-10-21T10:43:00.004-08:00

Recorded Books will be coming out with a slew of SF titles in the next two years, and I'm pleased to announce that Counting Heads will be one of them. As this is my first audiobook, I'm thrilled.

First Review

2008-10-08T19:08:00.003-08:00

And a good one it is. The current issue of Kirkus has a starred review of my upcoming novel. Unfortunately, it's behind a subscription wall, so most of you probably won't be able to read it. Which is probably for the better because it contains spoilers. So don't read it. Anyway, January 20, 2009, is a doubly auspicious date; not only will my book be released on that day, but a new president of the United States will be inaugurated. It's still unknown who that will be, but one thing we know for sure, it won't be Bush.

A visit to NORAD

2008-08-18T08:59:00.005-08:00

On the Thursday of the Denvention con, I went on a day trip to the old NORAD command facility in Cheyenne Mountain with about 20 other SF writers. In the official photo above we are standing in front of the iconic entry tunnel. The trip was the inspiration of author Jeff Carlson, who was interested in the site as a setting for scenes in an upcoming novel.

Jeff has the names of those in the photo here as well as a link to a larger version. And here's a story about the visit by Annalee Newitz in the SF ezine Io9. Another visitor, author John Joseph Adams, has another story about the trip for SCI FI.com. Lucky me no havta write anything.

MOS cover art

2008-08-16T17:28:00.001-08:00

I attended the Tor Rollout Panel at Devention last week and got my first glance at the cover art for my second novel, Mind Over Ship. I am very pleased, and I think it's my best cover yet. It's from noted British illustrator Paul Youll, and it depicts the space station, Trailing Earth, and an Oship under construction. It gives an impression of the vast scale of the space yards. It's a beaut!

Launch Pad

2008-08-02T09:27:00.003-08:00

This week I'm attending Launch Pad, an amazing workshop for science fiction writers and others involved in bringing astronomy to the public. It's the brainchild of astronomer and SF writer Mike Brotherton and is funded by NASA. Through lectures and labs, we are getting a refresher course in Astronomy (or in my case, my first formal class).

I won't go into greater detail because at least one of the attendees, Mary Robinette Kowal, is doing a great job blogging the experience. In her photo above, the discerning reader can see my shoulders and balding head behind author Nancy Kress and next to David Levine. Jerry Oltien, who is an author and one of our instructors is in the green Hawaiian-print shirt. We are busy exploring Kirchhoff's second law (A low-density gas excited to emit light will do so at specific wavelengths and thus produce an emission spectrum) and comparing our laboratory observations with a spectrometry chart.

Tonight we go to the Wyoming Infrared Observatory to check out the big telescope there.

Next week I continue on to Denver (along with most of the workshop attendees) for Worldcon.

MOS release date

2008-05-31T13:51:00.002-08:00

Tor sent me the copyedited manuscript of Mind Over Ship, and I've spent the last two weeks working on it. It's my last chance to fix problems and do a bit of polishing.

I received word from Tor that MOS will be released January 20, 2009, less than nine months from now.

Novel has new title!

2008-04-21T10:23:00.003-08:00

Risking confusion, I've decided to change the title of my new novel. A small change but one that I think will make the title less confusing, especially for people who have not already read Counting Heads.

Old title: Mind Over Oship

New title: Mind Over Ship

Back in Fairbanks

2008-04-21T09:50:00.002-08:00

I'm back in Fairbanks for at least the summer. Driving up from Homer, I took a little detour to visit Seward, a town I've never seen. Seward is one of the older towns in Alaska, established in 1903, only a year or two after Fairbanks. It's the southern terminus of the Alaska Railroad and an important fishing port. A population of only about 3000 people (of which males outnumber females 150 to 100).

Though Seward and Homer are on the same Kenai Peninsula, they are on opposite sides of the Kenai Mountains and enjoy different climates. While Homer is dry (for a maritime location), Seward is a rain forest, and the mountains drop precipitously into the water of Resurrection Bay. Fjords and glaciers abound.

The photo at the top of this post is a WWII-era quonset hut converted into a residence that I found driving around the compact residential area. At the bottom is a charming houseon a steep hillside probably from the same era.

French COUNTING HEADS

2008-03-15T11:47:00.003-08:00

Today marks the release of the French edition of my first novel. Somehow they translated the title to A PARADISE OF HELL. (Is that a title or a review?) It still gives me a frisson (to use a French word) of self-consciousness to see my name printed so boldly on the cover of a book. Couldn't they make it a little smaller? And put it in the corner? Oh well, here's hoping the French reading public loves me book.

MOO Delivery

2008-03-15T11:42:00.002-08:00

Yesterday I delivered the manuscript for my second novel, MIND OVER OSHIP, to my editor at Tor. Two-and-a-half years in the making, 119,000 words, a whole lot of exercising my imagination muscle. I'm glad to complete this project and am literally collapsed on the couch by the effort. I'm going to take a little time off, and in two weeks I drive back to Fairbanks to figure out what comes next.

The photo above is a view of the Homer Spit from my yard. The spit extends halfway across the Kachemak Bay, 4.5 miles.

First Reader's Draft

2007-11-15T19:34:00.000-09:00

How's this for an excuse. The reason I haven't updated this blog in so long is because I've been working so hard on my second novel. It's true! I've been putting in between 30 and 40 hours a week on it for the last several months. Last Saturday, I finished the Reader's Draft, which is the second complete rewrite. I've sent it off to my trusty gang of first readers. But the manuscript is so late, I can't wait for their feedback and am already starting from page one and revising.

An interesting note: I didn't keystroke the manuscript. I dictated it, all 455 pages, with Dragon Naturally Speaking, version 9. That software is a wonder, and in another version or two, I won't even have to speak; it'll just know what I want to write.

Anyway, the photo above is from my front door. I am spending the winter in Homer, Alaska, the house guest of some wonderful people here.

From the road

2007-08-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling home from St. Louis where I attended Archon 31 (and a few days visiting family in Indiana), and since I'm going to spend 21 hours en route back to Fairbanks today, I should try to catch up with recent events.

Teaching at Kachemak Bay Writer's Conference in June was fantastic. I presented a 2-part, 3-hour course on How to Plot a Popular Short Story, as well as a brief survey of science fiction. I had thought I was the first SF author to teach there, but I learned that Molly Glass, author of a marvelous short story on aliens (entitled, I think, "Lambing Season") was there a couple of years ago. There were about 160 attendees, from 15 states. The con was very well run, and the instructors an exceptional bunch of writers, publishers, and others in the industry, but the standout feature of the con is its location in Homer, Alaska. My state is rich in natural beauty, and Homer is near the top of the list (the photo above looks out across Kachemak Bay). The con takes place at the Land's End Hotel at the end of the Homer Spit. The spit in Homer is, I think, the longest natural spit in the world, about 4.5 miles. It projects out halfway across the bay and is an ideal place to fish for flounder, cod, and rockfish. There a "fishing hole" on the spit, an artificial bight where anglers can take salmon.

One reason I was so excited about teaching at the conference is because I wanted to check out Homer as a possible place to relocate. The last time I was there was 30 years ago when I was a "spit rat," that is, a cannery worker. Well, the town has grown since then, the cannery has burned down, there's a Safeway store, and real estate values are through the roof. Nevertheless, I plan to spend this winter there and I've arranged to stay in the guest house of a wonderful couple there. If all goes well, I may pack up and move permanently to Homer next year.

While at the con, I learned that my agent sold the paperback rights to my collection, GETTING TO KNOW YOU, to Del Rey. That's great, but it won't come out till Fall '08, which is a bummer because the Subterranean edition is sold out. I'm told that there may be a few hundred copies of it "sloshing around" in the distribution system, so don't despair if you haven't gotten yours yet. But for all practical purposes my book, which was released in April, is out of print until next year. Unless, it wins the 2007 Quill Award, that is. In that case Subterranean will put out a special edition.

I guess that my big news is that right before I left for Archon, I learned that a division of Universal Pictures, Focus Features, has agreed to purchase an option to my novella, "The Wedding Album." This is a big deal, to me at least. There's a dab of money involved, and if they exercise the option, a real payday. Of course, I'm told not to hold my breath, that 99% of options go nowhere. But "TWA" is probably my most popular work to date, and it would make a compelling SF movie, and quite an unusual one in that there are no killer robots or space aliens or starship battles involved.

Archon 31, itself, was a fun time. It was my first NASFIC. I went because I'm not going to worldcon in Yokohama. Unfortunately, few of my NY or London friends made it to the St. Louis con (actually held across the Mississippi in Collinsville, IL), and I recognized only a few faces. On the upside, this forced me to be more open to meeting new people. And I did! You can meet the nicest people at SF cons.

And finally, my second novel, the continuing saga of COUNTING HEADS, which has the working title MIND OVER OSHIP, is progressing by leaps and bounds (at least by my standards). Alas, it won't be ready by my deadline of mid-September. But my editor at Tor has given me an extension, and I plan to finish it up this winter in Homer.

The photo below is a raindrop on a rose hip leaf in my yard.

Quill Awards Finalist

2007-06-03T15:36:00.000-08:00

Big awards news--my story collection, Getting to Know You, was named yesterday as a finalist for the 2007 Quill Book Awards in SF/Fantasy! In case you haven't heard about the Quills, this is only their third year, and they seem to be an attempt to put some glitz into literary awards. The award ceremony is the only nationally televised book award ceremony in the US and will originate from Jazz at Lincoln Center and include celebs, a red carpet, and a gala celebration. Looks like I may need to buy a tux.

Getting Caught Up with Things

2007-05-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

Folks have asked for an update on the second novel. I'm so bad about posting, I should be punished. Here's some recent and upcoming items:

Writer Con in the Banana Belt
Next month I'm going to be an instructor at Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in sunny Homer, Alaska. It's a great extended weekend of workshops, readings, and panels in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And during summer solstice! I'm going to give a workshop about the wonders of science fiction and another on how to plot the popular short story. In other words, I'm going to get my genre on.

Philoctetes vs the Alien
Last month I was invited to join a roundtable discussion on Extraterrestrial Life at the Philoctetes Center in NYC. The Philoctetes Center is an organization dedicated to the multi-disciplinary exploration of human imagination. In other words, they get scientists, artists, and experts of all sorts together around a table and let them talk about interesting stuff. You can watch a streaming video of the hour-and-a-half discussion. I, myself, don't hold forth till about an hour into it.

Novel #2 Update
I took advantage of my trip to NYC to visit my editor at Tor, David Hartwell. I had finished the first draft of Mind Over Oship in January, but since then I've changed the book a lot, and I'm happy with the direction I'm taking. For those of you who read Counting Heads, I guess I can tell you that MOO picks up right where CH leaves off. Originally I followed the same three threads, but in the second draft I've cut out pretty much the whole Kodiak thread. Bogdan and crew were just taking up too much space to tell their story. It'll have to be a separate book someday. So, now I'm following the Starke thread, with Meewee and the Oships, and the Mary and Fred thread. M and F, in fact, get about half of the book.

The book was originally due to Tor by mid-September 2007, but I couldn't see how it would be finished and polished by then, and after I gave Hartwell my progress report, I asked if I could have another six months. He agreed, and so I intend to have it in by next March. That means I should be polishing it all winter. Sorry to make everyone wait to see what happens, but these things take time. At least they take me time.

The photo above shows a building under construction wrapping near the Tor offices. Rather SFnal.

Launching my story collection

2007-05-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

This week I launch my debut short story collection, Getting to Know You. I'll be at the Fairbanks Barnes & Noble on Friday, May 11, 7-9 pm and then on Thursday May 17, I'll be at the Fairbanks Gulliver's Bookstore from 6-8 pm.

The only story I seem to have of just the right length for a public reading is "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz." But I've read that one a number of times locally and won't subject the public to it again. Instead, I think I'll give a sampler of openings. I'll read the first seven minutes of three separate stories.

Hope to see you there.

Osama Phone Home

2007-03-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

I have a new story in this issue (March/April) of MIT Technology Review. It's called "Osama Phone Home," and is about the most political and contemporary piece I've ever done. It's also the first science fiction the TR has published in its century of reporting on emergent tech. Here's what editor/publisher Jason Pontin writes in the same issue:

In this, I believe, I am an entirely conventional technologist. Most of us came to technology through science fiction; our imaginations remain secretly moved by science-fictional ideas. Only the very exalted are honest about their debt. In his collection of lectures on the future of technology, Imagined Worlds, the great theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson writes, "Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams."

As to the photo at the top of this entry, I think it's a dead alien. I found it lying on the snow on the trail to my shed. It was already dead when I found it. A powerful build, hairy legs, a horse-like head. I didn't move it, and I think the foxes got it.

Getting to Know You--First Review!

2007-02-12T18:35:00.000-09:00

My story collection got a starred review in Publishers Weekly today. Very cool and a good way to start out. The title above is linked to the review, but you need to be a subscriber.

* Getting to Know You
David Marusek. Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $25 (297p) ISBN 978-1-59606-088-3

Marusek, in a blurb for this superb collection of 10 stories (all the shorter SF he's published to date), gives fair warning when he says he lays his stories "like traps and bait[s] them with shiny ideas." Since the author lives in Alaska, it's no surprise to find that his characters inhabit extreme environments, both physical and psychological. "The Earth Is on the Mend" and "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz" are set in the Arctic, with characters made pragmatic by cold circumstance. Similarly stark is the world of "Cabbages and Kale or How We Downsized North America" (one of several entries that are sketches for his 2006 novel, Counting Heads), where characters fight to stay ahead of change, and one bad decision can topple a world. Marusek's "shiny ideas"—cloned laborers, electronic "proxies," the "boutique economy"—sparkle, but these assured stories also draw on core SF themes: in the face of change, what does it mean to be human, and where do we draw the line between helping ourselves and hurting others? (Apr.)

Sharron--A True Hero of the Arts

2007-02-12T18:28:00.000-09:00

When I received the first galleys of my story collection to proof, I was compelled to read all eleven stories again, looking for typos and errors. When you write a story (or novel), you have to read and reread the piece many times, from first glimmerings, through many drafts, and much polishing to the final typeset galleys. Generally, you don't read the story when it comes out in print because by then you're sick of it and would feel satisfied if you never saw the story again in this life.

In addition, I updated "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" for inclusion in the novel, so I must have read that one well over 50 times. It's truly hard to read something so many times.

After the first read-through, I returned the galley. Then I realized that the manuscripts I had supplied Subterranean Press had never been reconciled to the published version of the stories. And there are always subtle edits done in the final copyediting. So I was faced with going through the eleven stories yet another time, this time comparing them word for word against the published versions.

My heart was not up to the task. I knew it would crush me, so I sent out a plea for help to the Borough Library SF reading group I belong to. And this young woman answered the call and volunteered to do the final read through for me. She may have saved my sanity; therefore, I pronounce Sharron Albert a True Hero of the Arts!

Thank you.

Neb Prelim Ballot!

2007-01-10T16:39:00.000-09:00

Good news for my first novel, Counting Heads. It's made the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award.

The photo above is my brother, Mark, dressed up at Holloween as the KFC Colonel. Looks like he's counting hands.

Story collection is coming along

2007-01-10T16:34:00.000-09:00

Subterranean Press is putting the finishing touches on my collection to be released in April. Here's what the cover is looking like at this stage. Illustrator is Mark A. Nelson. You can pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and quality bookstores everywhere.

Read Czech?

2007-01-10T16:30:00.000-09:00

A Czech anthology has been published that includes my story "The Wedding Album." Looks like a winner. Here's the lineup:

PAOLO BACIGALUPI: THE PASHO (Asimov's SF September 2004)
LAIRD BARRON: BULLDOZER (Sci Fiction 2004)
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK: THE LANGUAGE OF MOTHS (Realms of Fantasy 2005)
ALAN DENIRO: SALTING THE MAP (Fortean Bureau 2003)
CORY DOCTOROW: ANDA'S GAME (Salon 2004)
JEFFREY FORD: IN THE HOUSE OF FOUR SEASONS (Fantasy Magazine 2005)
GREGORY FROST: MADONNA OF THE MAQUILADORA (Asimov´s SF May 2002)
THEODORA GOSS: PIP AND THE FAIRIES (Strange Horizons 2005)
EILEEN GUNN: COMING TO TERMS (Stable Strategies 2004)
KIJ JOHNSON: AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES (Sci Fiction website 2003)
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN: RIDING THE WHITE BULL (Argosy Jan/Feb 2004)
ELLEN KLAGES: TIME GYPSY (Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction 1998)
JAY LAKE: INTO THE GARDENS OF SWEET NIGHT (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XIX 2003)
DAVID MARUSEK: THE WEDDING ALBUM (Asimov's SF June 1999)
PAUL MELKO: FALLOW EARTH (Asimov's SF June 2004)
Sarah Monette: Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 2002)
TIM PRATT: LITTLE GODS (Strange Horizons 2002)
Bruce Holland Rogers: Thirteen Ways to Water (Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, eds. Martin H. Greenberg & John Helfers 1998)
BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM: EMBRACING-THE-NEW (Asimov's SF January 2004)
KEN WHARTON: ALOHA (Analog June 2003)

Special guest:
HAL DUNCAN: THE TOWER OF MORNING'S BONES (not yet published)

Story Collection Pre-Order

2006-10-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

Subterranean Press has just made my upcoming short story collection available for pre-order. The book is due for release in April 07, but you can reserve a copy today.

The photo at the top is blown fireweed from before our first snowfall a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure why I'm into posting nature snapshots here lately, but I am, so deal with it.

Big doings in October

2006-09-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

Next month I have three readings in Fairbanks. I plan on reading a different piece at each.

Friday, October 6, 7:00 PM--UA Museum
My reading will launch the new season of the Midnight Sun Readers Series at the gorgeous new University of Alaska Museum addition. I will read something from COUNTING HEADS that I haven't read in public before. All are welcome.

Friday, October 13, 2:45 PM--UAF University Park
This is part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Fall Schedule of "Fairbanks Authors." You have to be enrolled in the class to attend (but I think you can still sign up; call 907-474-6607). I plan to speak on the eternal question asked of writers--Where do your ideas come from? To illustrate, I will read my only SF story set in Fairbanks--"Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz."

Saturday, October 21, 7:00 PM--Alaskaland Bear Gallery
I will be one of several local SF writers reading from their work. I plan to debut a work in progress, a short short story called, "Five Glimpses of the Day After Tomorrow." All are welcome.

The photo above is a particularly pretty fungus growing in my yard.

LA Worldcon

2006-08-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss in keeping this blog current. The long and the short of it is that I'm working full time on the second novel and two commissioned short stories. Unfortunately, I don't have the time even now to update with details. I just wanted to announce, for anyone in the LA area, that I'll be at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim from this Wednesay, August 23, through Sunday the 27th. The program committee there has declined to assign me ANY program events, so I won't be on panels, have a reading, or be on the autographing schedule. But I'll be hanging out, attending panels, parties, etc. and if anyone wants to have me autograph their copy of COUNTING HEADS or to just say hello, please stop me in the halls. Also, I'll be checking the voodoo board and my emails regularly. Do approach me; I'd be more than glad to meet you.

The photo above is how I felt when the con program committee informed me that there was no place on the program for me. I was ready to go ballistic, but friends calmed me down. No, actually, it's a parasite that appeared on my wild roses this year. It looks dastardly, but only infected a plant or two. Nevertheless, few of my dozens of rose plants produced rose hips this year, though I don't think that was related to this particular pest.

Campbell finalist

2006-05-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

I am proud to announce that COUNTING HEADS was named one of twelve finalists for the John W. Campbell Award. The Campbell Award is for the best novel as judged by a jury selected by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. These are the same folks who present the Sturgeon Award for best short fiction, which "The Wedding Album" won in 2000. Here's the full story.

By the way, the above picture has nothing to do with the Campbell. It's just a nice picture of the trunk of a paper birch across the road that I like.

Reading at Barnes & Noble

2006-05-24T18:02:00.000-08:00

My reading at the new Fairbanks Barnes & Noble was a big success, though I think I read too fast. The chapter from MIND OVER OSHIP that I prepared was longer than the 20 minutes that I feel is optimal for a live reading. But afterwards in the Q & A period, the audience kept me talking longer than I read, so I guess no one was too impatient to get out of there. The bookstore staff even served little cakes from the cafe, a neat touch.

Reading at Barnes & Noble

2006-05-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

I will read a chapter from my second book-in-progress, MIND OVER OSHIP, on Saturday, May 20, at the new Fairbanks Barnes and Noble bookstore, starting at 7 PM. Hope to see you there.

Second Season

2006-05-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

I am pleased and proud to announce that COUNTING HEADS has been doing well enough (going into its third printing) that I have been afforded the privilege of publishing a second book.

I've recently signed a contract with Tor with a September 2007 delivery date. Such a short deadline makes me nervous, since I've never written under contract before, and 18 months seems to me an incredibly brief length of time to do a novel (the first one took six years if you include "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy"). But I am filling binders with words and I'm fairly confident in my abilities.

I want to give a few details about Book 2, but first I should try to clear up a loose end or two about COUNTING HEADS. One thing that almost every review remarked on was the ending. Here's how Bookmarks Magazine, a sort of review digest for bibliophiles, put it, "Only the ending rang false in its brevity, suggesting that perhaps a sequel may be on its way."

So, is Book 2 a sequel, and if so, why was that fact missing on the COUNTING HEADS cover?

Book 2, which has a working title of MIND OVER OSHIP, does pick up right after the close of CH, with the same characters and overarching story line, but I don't think of it as a sequel, for that implies that the initial book was complete in itself. "Second in a series," is closer but I think implies more plot cohesion than I have in mind. I prefer to use a TV metaphor and think of these books as seasons of an ensemble cast drama, like ER or The West Wing.

What is the story arc of ER? A look at working in a busy county hospital emergency room in Chicago. That's it; that's what serves as plot. Characters come and go through the seasons, issues are explored, the administration and set changes (as they would in real life), and patients keep rolling in for their life and death struggles. The plot of The West Wing is: This is what it's like working in the White House for a popular liberal president. How much more open-ended can you get? Would you call the second season of ER a sequel of the first? Do you expect each season to wrap up all the individual plot threads? I don't think so.

With the TV model in mind, my story arc is about a thousand-year voyage aboard a colony ship traveling to a new star system, including the time it takes to get off the ground, the trip itself, and time spent at the other end at the destination. In other words, my plot line is quite open-ended, and I think the only limit to its run is declining interest, both the readers' and mine. And I feel empowered to leave a lot of loose ends at the end of any single season--book.

While I regret that no mention of future installments appeared at the CH release, I certainly understand why it didn't. Most readers have no idea how competitive the media is these days. It's excruciatingly tough to break into print in the fiction field. Publishers don't just hand out contracts, especially to writers of quirky fiction like me. I believe that David Harwell and Tor took a chance on me. I believe this because of all the other publishers who saw the manuscript passed on it. It doesn't surprise me that my sale was for a single book, not a trilogy. I'm not sure I would have even accepted a multi-book deal, not being sure I could even write one book at the time.

This brings up another sticky point. Some readers think that CH is half a book. This misimpression is probably my fault. On this blog (the inaugural posting) and other places I describe the CH timeline in which I describe how Hartwell asked me to cut the book in two (at 185,000 words it was just too long for marketing purposes). While it's true that I did cut the book in two, he subsequently asked me to put them back together for artistic reasons, and that's what I did. CH is the whole book, even if, as the Publisher's Weekly reviewer said, "it doesn't so much come to a conclusion as crash headlong into the last page."

My Morning Glory

2006-04-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

My latest short story, "My Morning Glory," was published today in the British science journal, NATURE. It's part of their Futures series of short shorts. My story is only 800 words long. I love short shorts. I'm thinking of specializing in them and writing only short shorts and novels from now on. The main distinction of this story is not its length, however, but the fact that it has a happy ending. An unalloyed happy ending--my first!

The story is online here, but you have to have an account to log in. Sorry.

Signs of Spring

2006-04-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

This week the state road crew came out with plows and dozers and prepared Yankovich Road for breakup. The photo above shows my newly scraped and bermed mailbox.

After an especially cold and gloomy March, we finally have a sunny, warm (30s F) couple of days in a row, and things are quickening. The roads are puddled, trees are shedding snow load, packed trails are soft underfoot. So far the quintessential sign of spring, at least for me, has not started--water dripping from the eaves of my house, but it could happen any minute now, and I am so ready.

Short Story Collection!

2006-04-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

Finally and at last there will be a collection of my short stories! I am so excited. I have just signed a contract with Subterranean Press, and editor Bill Schafer and I are beginning the design process. The volume will include all of my published short fiction, and I plan to introduce each story with a few choice paragraphs of background info.

The book is on a fast track for publication and may be released as early as January 07.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed me supporting this collection. Your interest is everything.

Ice Art

2006-03-26T17:14:00.000-09:00

If you've been thinking about visiting Alaska in the winter but never knew why, here's one good reason.

Daughter Kalina and friend Monika and I went to the Ice Art park last night, the last weekend before the park closes (and sculptures bulldozed, lest they melt and fall on people). I'll bet most readers of this blog won't know that Fairbanks is a stop on the world ice sculpting circuit. Our sculpture park draws ice artists from all the ice hotspots, including Russia, China, Germany, and France.

Not that these babies are in any real danger of melting any time soon. We have had such a cold gloomy March.

Here are Monika and Kalina. I left the red eye in because it seemed to fit. Sorry, girls.

Here's a detail of a much larger piece. The lighting itself is artistry.

Foreign Deal

2006-03-26T17:01:00.000-09:00

The car pictured above is not my car, only a car I have lusted over in public in Seattle.

I have just signed a contract for publication of COUNTING HEADS in Romania. My agent tells me there are more foreign contracts on the way, but this is the first to arrive. I can't wait to see what the book will look like all duded up in Bucharest having dinner with the folks from Editura Tritonic. Very cool, little book.

A lap-ful o' denali

2006-03-17T19:29:00.000-09:00

When I flew to Anchorage last week, the pilot literally flew us right over the mountain. I've never been so close.

Geek-fu (or enough about me)

2006-03-17T19:05:00.000-09:00

Yesterday I stumbled across Andrew Wheeler's blog in which I learned that there has been a minor flame war concerning my NYTBR review on March 5. Flame war may be too strong a term for what transpired, but here are some links to judge for yourself. Link , Link 2 , Link 3 , Link 4 , Link 5 , Link 6 , Link 7.

You will note that there were a lot of hot heads and that much vitriol was spilled. Remarkably, my book, the purported object of the review, was largely ignored. That's because the fracas wasn't about my book. It was mostly a rant against the Time's reviewer, Dave Itzkoff, and his fitness or lack thereof, to represent Science Fiction in the pages of the NYT.

My role in all this, I think, is to remain a stunned by-stander. Of course, I'm tempted to weigh in on my book's behalf. To refute some of the malicious lies written about it. To chastise the number of self-appointed pundits who, admitting they haven't even read the book, nevertheless adopt the reviewer's opinions without challenge and dismiss it as unworthy of taking up so much valuable space in the NYT.

But alas, I have already cut COUNTING HEADS loose. I gave it as good a launch as my publicist at Tor and I could muster. We gave it a loving shove into an indifferent world. My debut novel is on its own now, and if it wants to mix it up in the NYT, there's nothing I can do about it except chew my nails and wish it well. Keep your dukes up, little book.

New York Times Book Review

2006-03-14T08:12:00.000-09:00

In case I haven't crowed loud enough, my novel COUNTING HEADS received a full-page review in the NYT on March 5 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05itzkoff.html?ex=1299214800&en=bba96943259227fa&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss). I think I'm finally coming to grips with it. At first I thought it was a mixed review, seeing how the reviewer said some things I took as disparaging.

Then I reread the review and took it as backhanded NYC speech for "We love it!"

Then I read it not as a review to tell potential readers about my book (it doesn't) but rather as a personal missive from the reviewer to me alone. The last paragraph is the major tip-off where, with a wink and a nudge, he gives me some friendly advice about writing my next books.

Well, I'm already a third of the way through the first draft of the next book, tentatively titled, MIND OVER OSHIP, and I think the emotionally stunted AIs are taking over. So much for good advice.

In any case, the issue of the hour is finally getting a story collection published. (Read the next post down.) Send me an email at david@marusek.com and I'll attach you a pdf of my Sturgeon Award-winning novella, "The Wedding Album." If you'd be interested in seeing a story collection, let me know and I'll use it in my lobbying efforts.

And at the top is the photoshopped mug shot the Times ran with the review. What can I say--I'll make an attractive cyborg.

The short stories

2006-03-05T21:42:00.000-09:00

I regularly receive enquiries about my short fiction. I've been wanting to have a collection for years, but putting out a collection of short stories is harder than you might think. I'm told collections lose money for the publisher, and my agent hasn't landed me a deal yet.

On the other hand, I'm not thrilled with the idea of self-publishing them as a POD or ebook either. And I'm not yet in the Creative Commons camp where I would simply post them on my site and let people download them at will. I know there's a lot of arguments for and against doing this, but I'm not ready yet.

However, with today's review in the NYT and reviewer Dave Itzkoff calling them "as concentrated and potent as a dwarf star," I have to do something. Especially with people sending me emails all day asking about them. My agent is in England at the moment. When he returns to NYC, I'll start a campaign with him and David Hartwell at Tor to GIVE ME A COLLECTION, DANG IT. You can help by emailing me and saying you'd be interested in such a colleciton.

In the meantime, I'll send you a complimentary pdf copy of "The Wedding Album" just for the asking. david@marusek.com

Also, there's a Stories link on my web page (www.marusek.com) with a complete bibliography. Many of my stories have been anthologized and should be available at most public libraries. Even here in Fairbanks, Alaska, I can find all of them at our excellent Noel Wien Library.

some catch-up news

2006-03-01T19:11:00.000-09:00

My big news is that COUNTING HEADS will be reviewed this Sunday, March 5, in The New York Times Book Review. And not just a tiny paragraph notice, the review covers a whole page and is illustrated with a mug shot in which my face is photoshopped to look like--a Borg, I guess. Anyway, very SFnal.

What I don't get is all the hand-wringing about SF being too geeky. Must be a NYC thing.

The photo above is of me doing a signing at the local Waldenbooks store last month. This was the first time I've done the "author sitting out front next to a table of books" thing. My daughter, Kalina, was up for the weekend, and she sat with me, so it was actually a good visit. And a number of people did drop by to BUY THE BOOK, so there was some book business going on too.

My second piece of good news is that I sold a short short story to NATURE, the venerable, weekly, British science journal. They are publishing a series of single-page short SF stories called Futures. The stories are 800 to 900 words in length. Mine, which will be my 11th published short story, is called "My Morning Glory." It's a little confection, like a bon bon, that leaves a sweet taste in the mouth. In other words, I finally wrote a happy story. I think.

Don't know which issue it'll appear in.

Almost up to speed

2005-12-24T20:23:00.000-09:00

With a couple of my deadlines met, I am clawing my way back to normalcy. Making sure to get in a writing session, no matter the length, every day before turning to the day jobs.

This week the day jobs have been eclipsed by the return of the iBook. I finished up my end of semester schoolwork on my backup computer and turned in the grades on Monday. I also delivered my InDesign course to the Center for Distance Ed. On Wednesday my iBook came back, repaired, but unresponsive. The stupid thing wouldn't boot up. I used the OS disk to start it up and run a self-repair app. But the repair failed and the only thing left to do was reinstall the operating system (Tiger). But it wouldn't take an archive reinstall, so I had to do a clean install. That is, to erase the whole freakin' hard drive and everything on it. Wipe the slate clean.

That's pretty drastic, but I had been prepared for just that eventuality. Even after the logic board goes kaplooey, the hard drive can be tapped with what Apple calls Target Disk Mode. So, with my external DVD burner and my backup computer, I had been able to record everything of worth off the computer before I even sent it in.

And a lot of junk accumulates on a computer in the course of three years. It collects like lint, filling up whole gigabytes. For instance, I still maintained System 9.2 and all the files to support it, as well as Classic apps I haven't launched in years. I can safely say that I don't need System 9 anymore. I've actually got some free memory now.

Recovery takes time, however, and a couple of unpaid days of loading files and applications and moving furniture. By now I am almost back up to speed.

At the top of this entry is a photo of my private empire that I took at high noon on Wednesday--Solstice. The temperature was plus 5 degrees Fahrenheit. You can see the Sun at its zenith through the trees. Total possible daylight for the shortest day--about 3 hours and 42 minutes.

At the bottom of this entry is a photo I took last month of a ruined cabin on the side of the road to Williams, Indiana. The white stripes on the inside of the exposed walls are lath and plaster. Notice the dovetailed building corners. Not a lick of insulation. I wonder if the clapboard once covered the whole cabin and has been cannibalized for some other project. A window thus far spared. Very solid construction and weathering well.

My work cubby

2005-12-19T17:33:00.000-09:00

Here is where I've been buried for the last week getting caught up on deadlines. This is my backup workstation. It's a G4 Power Mac with only 533 megahertz of clock speed, one quarter what the current model delivers. And as you can see, it's tucked into a low-ceilinged corner of my "rec room" upstairs. But for all the discomfort and slow speed, this computer has been a lifesaver during my iBook's frequent illnesses.

I've finally had to admit that my iBook has a terminal disease, a chronic form of congenital logic board failure. My little laptop just turned 3 years old last month, and it's been in the shop four times now for motherboard replacement. That makes a fatal board attack every nine months, on average. Apple has recognized this malady to be a design flaw and has repaired it each time at no charge. They even send a two-way overnight shipping carton for it. Which is good since they don't seem able to fix it. If I had bought extended coverage, I imagine I could have gotten them to replace the computer on its third failure, but by now all they can do is swap out yet another logic board and hope that this time it works.

Still, they want to keep me a happy Apple customer, so they sent me a little gift to smooth over any inconvenience--an iPod Shuffle. Which is very cool, since I've been wanting to explore podcasts. See what kind of books on pod are out there. See what it would take to get mine produced.

Book Signing Cancellation

2005-12-16T12:20:00.000-09:00

Waldenbooks in Fairbanks has cancelled my book signing, scheduled for tomorrow, because of lack of books. Their regular distributor has my books on backorder. We'll try to reschedule for sometime in January. Stay tuned.

Home again

2005-12-16T12:17:00.000-09:00

I don't want people to think I've dropped off the face of the Earth, but I have returned to Fairbanks where I am up to my eyeballs in late deadlines for my day jobs, all of them. I hope to get caught up and be able to post an update by Christmas. stay tuned.

schedule change

2005-12-08T08:08:00.000-09:00

For those of you planning to attend my reading this Saturday at Elliot Bay Books, the time has apparently been changed to 8:00 PM. See ya there.

that's entertainment 2

2005-12-07T07:46:00.000-09:00

My old college buddy Bob Kay Jr. was driving me around Seattle yesterday in his jet black Buick LeSabre Limited Edition when I spied this swimmer poised on the corner of a downtown building. I had only a red light's duration to pull out my camera and snap this photo from below.

I have no idea what buildings these are or where downtown they're located, but putting yesterday's neon swimmer together with this one makes me wonder--are there more neon swimmers in Seattle? Is this a Seattle thing? If anyone out there has an answer or knows the location of yet more neon swimmers, please let me know.

**************************************************

Meanwhile, back at the book tour, I am told by my daughter that Entertainment Weekly doesn't do SF reviews very often and that the grade they gave my book--an A minus--is actually excellent because they rarely give out As. Moreover, they often brand the books in their own featured reviews with a B or worse.

Especially now, says my daughter, at Christmastime with people reading these reviews while on the lookout for gift ideas.

Then, a fellow named Jeff comments on yesterday's blog entry saying that he first became aware of my book through the EW review and went right out and bought it. And right on cue, my sales ranking on Amazon.com, which had sunk to the low 20K range this week, suddlenly shot up to 3250 this morning. Can this sales bump be attributed to the review? Anyway, I'm being impressed by my book's good fortune when I get an email from my Clarion West classmate Cindy Ward. She sends a link to a piece written by a reviewer for the entertainment magazine CFQ and its Yearbook edition. Go to

http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/feature_list.html

It's an article exposing the arbitrary process of picking a Ten Best list. The reviewer, Paula Guran, says,

"An entire section on "first novels" is scuttled except for Counting Heads by David Marusek and Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground. The Marusek is another personal favorite that absolutely blew me away. It's flawed, yes, but the high level of imagination is incredible. But I go for the VanderMeer instead. I leave the worthy Veniss Underground on the list because I feel that although it is "new literate" (for lack of a better term) SF/F, it is accessible and enjoyable by a wide audience. It is also a bit of a cheat because it was originally published a couple of years ago by independent press, but I'm also supposed to be concentrating on major publishers, so if small press doesn't really count...then publication by a major does. Or something likes that."

Huh? Say again? You picked Jeff's over mine why?

Anyway, reading this makes the EW placement even more amazing, because the EW reviewer must have had to go through an equally capricious and indefensible winnowing process in reducing his list down to, not ten, but to four finalists. And since in this case we came up a winner, we're entirely good with it.

that's entertainment

2005-12-06T08:10:00.000-09:00

Here's something I found on a walk Sunday on Leary Way. Just waiting to be photoshopped.

My big news is a positive review in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (Dec. 9, 2005). Very cool.

Third Place Commons

2005-12-03T06:53:00.000-09:00

My reading at Third Place Books last night came off well, but that's not the news. The news is what the name of that bookstore means. I had wondered if it was a self-deprecating crack as in, "We're not even in second place, but shop here anyway." An odd name for a bookstore. But after the reading, I asked Megan, my bookstore host, for an explanation, and she refered to the owner's allegiance to the idea that a community needs a commons to freely meet and build social bonds. I remembered at once the theory and realized that the bookstore was only part of the plan, that the real Third Place was the area I had passed coming in, what I took to be a food court. Here's a gloss from the site http://www.frwy.ca/third_place.html/.

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"Social condensers" -- the place where citizens of a community or neighbourhood meet to develop friendships, discuss issues, and interact with others -- have always been an important way in which the community developed and retained cohesion and a sense of identity.

Ray Oldenburg (1989), in "The Great Good Place", calls these locations "third places." The first being the home and the second being work. These third places are crucial to a community for a number of reasons, according to Oldenburg. They are distinctive informal gathering places, they make people feel at home, they nourish relationships and a diversity of human contact, they help create a sense of place and community, they invoke a sense of civic pride, they provide numerous opportunities for serendipity, they promote companionship, they allow people to relax and unwind after a long day at work, they are socially binding, they encourage sociability instead of isolation, and they make life more colourful. Their disappearance in our culture is unhealthy for our cities because, as Oldenburg points out, they are the bedrock of community life and all the benefits that come from such interaction.
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I can't eat before a reading, and so we had planned to dine afterwards, and we entered the commons, a large space which on a Friday evening was crowded with about 200 people of all ages seated around tables. Some were eating, some playing board games (which were freely available) or cards or just visiting with each other. There was a 10-foot square checkerboard carpet with dog-sized chess pieces in play. A little nook where dozens of teen-agers were engrossed in some kind of multi-player card game. Lots of happy noise. What had first made me think this was a food court, the ring of food counters surrounding it, was on closer inspection, unique in that there were no franchises, at least none that I recognized. A real Mexican restaurant, not Taco Bell. Oriental, pizza, etc. The feeling was that these restaurants didn't own the space, as in a mall food court. You didn't need to purchase your right to sit on a chair. Rather, you could bring your own meal, if you wanted, and hang out as long as you like.

My party (Cindy Ward and Joe Murphy, Nancy and John Lee, Curtis) and I took our meals at a wine bar just as a free musical concert was starting on the stage. A grand, wonderful way to spend a Friday evening. How I long to have something like this in Fairbanks.

Ten years ago or so Fairbanks residents were given an opportunity to build such a Third Place commons. Four or five community center plans were floated, and a commons plan was among them and was the one I voted for. But the vote went for the "multi-purpose" stadium, the Carlson Center, where hockey games, musical concerts, and home product shows are held. Pretty much all business and not a place anyone goes to in-between events. The closest thing we have to a Third Place, IMO, is Fred Meyers where you can meet friends in the grocery aisles.

Park Place Books reading

2005-12-02T08:08:00.000-09:00

Here's a look at the reading earlier this week at Park Place Books in Kirkland.

Thanksgiving dinner

2005-12-02T08:06:00.000-09:00

A nice photo of my mother, Betty, my daughter, Kalina, and her boyfriend, Ronan.

3rd Place Books

2005-12-01T13:46:00.000-09:00

Tomorrow evening at 6:30 is my reading at 3rd Place Books in Lakewood. Am looking forward to it since everyone says they do a good job of hosting readings.

In the morning, Kalina and I will take a tour of Amgen, the biotech company, as guests of a researcher there who attended my Park Place reading on Tuesday.

Last night I attended the Socrates Cafe in Queen Ann, the same group I attended year and a half ago when I spent the summer in Seattle. A huge turnout, 17 people. Our topic of discussion: With the US arguably the most materialistic country in the world, how come there's so much religion here?

Having just spent a couple of weeks in the Bible belt of southern Indiana, I had a few insights to share.

On Saturday there's the monthly Vanguard party, a get-together of Seattle SF folks. That's what I like about Seattle. So much for me to do.

Reading at Park Place Books

2005-12-01T13:43:00.000-09:00

My reading in Kirkland came off very well. Small but dedicated audience that started asking questions the moment I sat down. A small indie bookstore with a very homey and comfortable reading area. I've got photos I'll post eventually.

public terminals

2005-12-01T13:14:00.000-09:00

Laptop is dead, and I have been forced to rely on public terminals to continue working on the course design I'm doing and to answer my email and conduct my banking, travel requirements, etc. Every public terminal has its own features and limitations, and they all tend to be cluncky and restrictive of priviledges, timed sessions, and functions. I lack all my little helper apps. I lack my calendar and address book, the archives of past email, my HTML editor, my favorite widgets and music. Not to mention my photo and layout software. This machine I'm on right now at the UW law library has no word processor of any sort. If you want to compose a few paragraphs, you have to do so in the body of an email and send it to yourself.

In other words, I am suffering separation anxiety. My laptop ferries too much of my day-to-day life for my own good. Already I have surrendered to machines, and being offline is a trauma.

Falling offline once in a while is good, though, I'm sure, for it teaches you to back up zealously and reminds you how to cope in the natural world. Akin to being sent into the woods with only a knife and single match.

When I was 19, during the summer after my first year at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 70's, I had big plans to hitchhike to see my friend Rusty in Denton, Texas. Two days before my departure, I was bodysurfing in the Pacific, wearing my glasses like a fool, and a wave knocked them off. Of course I never found them.

Putting my trip off was out of the question, and in those days a replacement pair of glasses took weeks, not hours, to receive. So I ordered a new pair to be shipped to Rusty's address in Texas, and I blithely set off from SoCal hitchhiking to Texas rather half blind.

On busy freeway onramps, hanging my thumb out, everything around me a sunbleached haze of fuzzy shapes. Having to reinterpret the world through new eyes. Is that a car stopped? Did it stop for me? At first it was very difficult. The frustration and anger of helplessness lasted a week. Eventually, I came to accept my nearsighted blindness with ease. Learned coping mechanisms. Adjusted.

Anyway, I've got photos I'd like to get up here but I can't right now. So to hell with everything!

Book seems to be doing well. Getting a new crop of reviews, mostly good. One sourpuss so far. Go to my web page www.marusek.com for links.

more of Chicago

2005-11-23T07:09:00.000-09:00

Things have gone from bad to worse computer-wise. Yesterday as I was working here in the Bloomington public library, trying to upload the web course for UAF, my monitor died. A recurrence of the logic board problem I've had before. After sitting for a few hours turned off, the monitor came back. If the past is any guide, I will have recurrent outages for up to a month before it fails for good and I have to send it in. I truly love my little iBook, but Apple doesn't seem able to fix this particular problem (though their attempts so far have been free for me). The computer is three years old this month and still not obsolete. But it looks like I'm blogging on borrowed time. Don't be surprised if my next entry isn't for a while.

I thought I'd put up some more of my Chicago pix. Something about these buildings that really grab my imagination. Above is a view looking north on Michigan Ave., the "Magnificent Mile," from across the river.

Here are two houses on Maple Street in Evanston, Brian Davies' block. They date from early last century when Evanston was home to Chicago's well-to-do. I don't think I'd have the patience to live in one of these--old wiring, creaky floors, steam heating--but I sure like looking at them.

Fill 'er up

2005-11-22T07:56:00.000-09:00

Eat your heart out, Fairbanks.

Bloomington Reading

2005-11-22T07:54:00.000-09:00

The event at the Bloomington Borders went off well. There was a good crowd, largely due to the attendance of my family as well as Paul Tengan's. Yes, that's Paul T from Fairbanks who just so happened to be visiting family in the area. It was quite the surprise seeing him there. The photo above is of his great niece, who attended and sat very patiently through the reading.

This bookstore has special meaning to me because it's where I brought my father shortly before he died nine years ago to show him the first book I was published in, the Year's Best 13th annual collection. He lifted the thick volume and said, "You wrote this whole book?"

Had a grand day at the reading and then with brother Jim and sister-in-law Maria. I've got lots of photos but no time and no bandwidth at my mother's. I brought my work with me, a web-based InDesign course I'm putting together for UAF. I drove into Bloomington today (30 miles) to use the wi-fi at the public library (very nice library) to put lessons up on Blackboard. Not a vacation, alas, because there's so much exploring I want to do. Not to mention family stuff. Oh, well.