To Blog or Not to Blog

A little while ago, I was wondering aloud to my wife Allysen whether keeping this blog going was a smart use of my time. After all, I don’t post to it nearly as frequently as I should to keep up an audience, and it does take up writing time that arguably I should be spending on my next book. Still, it’s a connection to you folks that I might not otherwise have. (Yeah, I could post to Facebook instead—but really, what’s the diff?)

And so, with perfect timing, along comes a very funny column in today’s Boston Globe:  “Not Blogging,” by James Parker, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. After the first two lines, I knew I had to read it aloud to Allysen. Says Parker:

I should have one, of course. I mean, shouldn’t I? I’ve been urged to get one. A confused middle-aged literatus like me, trying to keep himself afloat while the old industry paradigms, the old machineries of reputation and reward, shiver into fragments around him? I need a blog. A place to consolidate my brand. A forum for my views, untrammelled, unedited. A one-stop shop for all my “stuff.”

That established, he goes on to offer the opposing view:

So allow me then to dissent — to offer, if I may, a small and fading valentine to not-blogging. Or, as it used to be called, “living.”

Let’s start with the most obvious point against blogging: the labor. A blog must be fed several times a day, like a weight lifter or a Great Dane. Are you ready for that kind of commitment? Update, update, keep the posts coming… We all know the tiny electronic swat of dismay that one experiences upon checking a favorite blog and finding it unchanged or unrefreshed. Do that too often to your readers and they’ll ditch you, and your blog will die…

It’s not that I won’t blog — I just can’t. I’m a slow writer, for one thing. I write ve-ery slowly, in a soft mist of incomprehension, like a garden gnome coming to life on an English hillside. This is no good for a blogger. Bloggers write fast. They react.

I do sometimes wonder if that describes me. Though certainly there are some days when, if I didn’t write a little on my blog, I wouldn’t get any writing done at all.  Hmm…

Excuse me while I go make sure that this isn’t one of those days.

Paperback Tailspin

I haven’t quite known how to say this, so I guess I’ll just say it: the paperback sales on Sunborn have been terrible. The worst I’ve ever seen. Distribution is awful—the book isn’t even being stocked by many bookstores I would have expected to carry it, like Borders or my local Barnes and Noble superstore. Or if they carried it, they stocked one copy. Not six or eight, like in old days, but one. How can you launch a book like that?  And why is this happening?

The reasons are legion. And these are just the ones I know about.

For starters, there was a long interruption in my output, and the first three books of the Chaos Chronicles were long out of print. I tried to address this by offering free downloads—and that certainly helped stimulate interest, but clearly not enough. At the time the paperback was published, I was in a family crisis and slow off the mark in doing the usual promotion I would have done. Worse, promotion from the publisher was indifferent, and their declining to bring the first three books back into print spelled trouble.

These are the obvious reasons, but not the only ones.

According to my editor, slumping sales are bedeviling a lot of authors and a lot of mass-market paperback books. The biggest factor is that the distribution of paperbacks has gone to hell—not just in bookstores, but in places like newsstands and drugstores. There used to be hundreds of wholesalers, each knowing their own territories—the guys who drove the trucks and put books on the racks, and who knew from experience what kinds of books tended to sell where. Now it’s all consolidated, with a few huge outfits covering most of the business. And they’re doing it by computer from central locations, making decisions that literally make or break national distribution of a book. Books that once might have found a modest but respectable audience are now cut out of the loop; they simply are not carried by the wholesalers that would get them into points of sale outside the traditional bookstore. As a result, what was once a major avenue of sales—to the casual browser who came into a convenience store looking for soap or a candy bar and stopped to thumb books on a rack—is now limited to the guaranteed bestsellers. So, you can find a book like Sunborn easily enough online, but only if you’re looking for it. Your bookstore can order it, but only if you know to ask for it. But many potential new readers will never see it

Did my posting of free downloads help or hurt? It definitely helped make a lot more people aware of the books. Did it sell books or prevent sales? Will ebook sales make up some of the difference in paperback sales? Without a parallel universe to use as a control, there’s just no way to know. 

“How can I help?” I hear you saying. (Maybe I’m imagining. But let’s assume I’m hearing it.) One thing you can do, of course, is to head to your local bookshop if you haven’t already and pick up a copy—if not for yourself, then for a friend or relative. Another is simply to encourage your local bookstore to carry the book. If you special-order it, that’s one sale. If you can get them to stock a few copies, that could be several sales and a ping on their radar. And tell people. Word of mouth is the most effective single way to promote a book. And only you can do that.

I don’t intend to sit around doing nothing but complain. I’m in the process of rethinking and retooling promotion for the future. More and more these days, that job is left solely to the author (unless you’re already a bestseller and don’t actually need the help.) I have a bunch of ideas, and I’ll be writing about them from time to time and will definitely be interested in your feedback.

“The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.” —from the rejection slip for Diary of Anne Frank

“Legacy of Light” at Boston’s Lyric Stage

We got to the theater today, a rare treat for us, and enjoyed a terrific new play at the Lyric Stage in Boston: Legacy of Light, written by Karen Zacarias and directed by Lois Roach.  Funny and thought provoking, it focused on two women scientists—one the Enlightment figure Emilie du Chatelet, friend and lover of Voltaire, who built on the work of Isaac Newton in understanding light and energy.  The other, a fictional (I think!) astrophysicist of today, tries to make sense of herself as a mother-to-be as well as she thinks she understands the formation of a new planet circling a distant star.  Light and love and energy and collision of masses—they all come together like particles in the Large Hadron Collider, splintering and showering everything around them with new particles and life. 

The theme music is Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” Perfect!

If you’re in the Boston area, I highly recommend it.  Legacy of Light shows through March 13 at the Lyric Stage.  If you’re outside Boston, maybe it’ll come your way soon. 

Spring! Rollerblading! The Future!

The weather has been fantastic here, and we’ve officially declared it rollerblading and moped weather, back at last!  Allysen and I have been out on our skates two
days in a row, and can’t wait to get back in shape.  (Aachh—my $%^back*()&!)  Plus, we went tooling on our two-wheeled steeds, Dracos and Buckbeak, the other evening.  Fantastic!  

As Spring gears up, so too do the local journeyman SF/F writers.  Craig Gardner and I are about to crank up our third annual Advanced Writing workshop for graduates of our fall Ultimate SF Writing workshops.  We’ve got a good crew of students, most from our Fall 2009 group, but a couple from earlier groups, as well.  We start next Sunday.  It’ll be fun to see what folks are working on. 

Finally, one of my old Launchpad Astronomy Workshop buddies, Tempest Bradford, invited me to contribute to the inaugural “Burning Question” feature of Laptop Magazine online: Which technology makes you feel like you’re living in the future?  Check out my thoughts along with those of John Scalzi, Tobias Bucknell, Eileen Gunn, Charlie Stross, and others. 

Interview Here, Appearance There

ScifiBookshelf.com has just posted an interview with me.

I’ll be appearing at a fundraiser at my town library, Robbins Library of Arlington, Mass., tomorrow evening from 6 – 9. They’ve got a bunch of local authors coming, all bringing books to sign. Should be a fun event.

I’ll also be at Boskone, the annual convention sponsored by the New England Science Fiction Association, on Feb. 12 -13 (but not on Sunday).

Avatar Rocks

Allysen and I finally got to see Avatar in 3D today.  We both loved it.  The 3D effects were wonderful—but it wasn’t just a matter of great special effects.  It was a good story well told (familiar, to be sure), with believable characters and—above all—fabulous world building.  The landscape and the creatures were mesmerizing.  The banshees (read: dragons) were terrific, and who could not love the hammerhead rhinos?  To some extent, it was even scientifically plausible; the world-wide nervous system, although it sounded a lot like the Force when first introduced, actually made some sense.  The floating mountains were more in the Miyazaki fantasy realm, which I suspect was not a coincidence. 

It was fun to run a mental tally of all the sources that the movie clearly owes a debt to.  Native American (and probably African) tradition, of course.  Dune.  Anne McCaffrey’s dragon books—and for that matter, a whole tradition of dragons in fantasy and SF.  Dances with WolvesPocahontas, the animation?  I won’t call it a debt, because I doubt Cameron has ever read my books, but the avatar couches reminded me of my own rigger stations, and the Tree of Souls brought to mind the Tree of Ice in my second Chaos book, Strange Attractors.  Call it a resonance.  And now there surface contentions that Cameron borrowed liberally from the books of Russian SF novelists Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.  Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.  He clearly borrowed liberally from many worlds of literature and film.  He even borrowed from himself: I think I recognized that corporate exploitation type from Aliens, as well as the hotshot lady pilot. And of course the mechanical walkers. 

Did these connections detract from my enjoyment?  Not at all.  I felt that they were part of a great tradition of art building on art, as well as on life.  Some critics have accused the film of following the less admirable tradition of allowing big budget special effects to overwhelm any concern about good storytelling.  That’s often true—but not so much this time, I think.  The story, if not terribly deep or original, was nevertheless honest and moving. 

One of my favorite SF movies prior to this is also a Cameron film: The Abyss. It wasn’t altogether successful, but one thing it did beautifully was to create a sense of working and living beneath the sea.  It overlooked a few things for the sake of dramatic license, but it got a lot of it dead on.  (I’ve spent time underwater as a scuba diver.)  It’s that world building thing.  Some people demand scientific accuracy in world building.  I demand believability.  I want to be convinced.  And in Avatar, I was convinced. 

Sunborn in Paperback

Sunborn is now available in mass market paperback, from Tor Books—everywhere fine, cosmic, headbanging, epic, sensawunda, character-driven hard-SF is sold.  (And if you don’t find it in your local emporium, please ask for it!  You’ll be helping enormously.) 

For the first time in my life, I was so preoccupied by other things that I totally failed to mark the day my new book went on sale.  How bad is that?  It’s been officially available since December 29, and it only just hit me last night that it was actually out.  I did receive my author copies a few days before the publication date—in itself a first, I think.  Then I went on with life and blanked on the whole thing.  Don’t do what I did!  It’s not too late to give it as a gift!

Now, I must hit the web to see if I can find a good image of the cover.  Ah, here we go, from the Tor-Forge store:

Wouldn’t you like to own a copy today?

Podcast: “Story Structure”

Last summer I appeared as a guest lecturer at the Odyssey writing workshop.  What I talked most about was story structure, what it is, and why it’s important.  The folks at Odyssey have just posted an excerpt from my lecture as a podcast that you can listen to online, or right-click on to download as an MP3 file.  They have a number of similar excerpts online, and if you’re interested in hearing writers talk about the craft of writing, here’s the list of lectures.  If writing is one of your interests, check them out. 

Hoping Everyone Had a Fine Thanksgiving

Or at least, those of you in the U.S., where we just celebrated a day of remembering things we’re grateful for. For me, it was an atypical one, as my wife is in Puerto Rico with her parents, and my older daughter was at her boyfriend’s house. Younger daughter and I enjoyed the afternoon at the home of good friends, with lots of terrific food.

The last month has simply flown by. Teaching at MIT, and simultaneously running the Ultimate SF workshop, has been both time-consuming and thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding. All the students have been great to work with, and have been bringing some real talent to their writing projects. I’ll be surprised if I don’t see at least a few of their names in print in the next few years. Meanwhile, I’ve had a bunch of family issues going on, which has taken a lot of my energy and is one reason why I haven’t posted in a month. Another is that I’ve been experiencing serial computer failure. First my laptop: a nasty virus infestation, then a wonky hard drive, and finally the whole machine kacked. Only a couple of days after that, my office computer blew its video card. (That, at least, was fixable.) A few days after that, my PDA fritzed out. It felt almost like a concerted attack. Anyway, I’ve got a new laptop, a black Dell Inspiron named Cygnus-X for the black holes Cyg X-1 and Cyg X-3 (maybe). I know some people who have had bad experiences with Dell, so wish me luck. It seems like a good machine. What really sold me on it is the keyboard—vastly better for touch typing than any of the others I tried out. Anyway, so far I really like it.

So…back to getting some real writing done soon? Here’s hoping! I got some cheery encouragement in the form of actual royalties for my ebooks that went on sale last Spring. That market truly seems to be picking up.

Snow? On October 18?

Yes, indeed. I was driving to the store in the rain—and it didn’t really even feel that cold out—when I noticed that some of those raindrops were falling too slowly, and splatting too big on the windshield. By the time it was over, we had a steady fall of inch-and-a-half wide snowflakes. (Two to three centimeters, for you metric folk.)

Just a little joke the warming globe is playing on us, I guess. Or not. (This is not disproof of global climate change, by the way. One of the predictions of the warming of the Earth is that climate patterns may behave in unexpected ways.) For all I know, snow in New England in mid-October is well within the range of our crazy weather, anyway. But it sure felt weird. I was just pondering taking the air conditioners out of the windows, not an hour before.

Our Ultimate SF Workshop began tonight (okay, last night at this point), and it looks like we have a great group of aspiring writers, including people from a variety of walks of life. We almost cancelled the workshop last week because we only had three confirmed students. Today we had eleven confirmed, and one more possible late-joiner. Full house! Lots of good workshopping ahead of us.

“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. —Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” —Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

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