Under the sub-heading, Implementation of the Policy with Regards to Conflict Minerals, the document reads:

“We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals. We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain. Similarly, Nokia has a no tolerance policy with respect to corruption, money-laundering and bribery. We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles.”

Nokia Publishes Policy on Conflict Minerals.

Ah, well do I remember the era of Cyberpunk 2020 and a world filled with corporations more powerful than governments, able to dictate laws and shape society. While I applaud a policy that has human rights at its core, I can’t help but laugh at the irony of a corporation prohibiting human rights abuses. I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.

 

I was presented this link in a class I’m taking on “World Building in SF/F”: SFSignal Presents: A guide to navigating NPR’s top 100 SF/F books presents a decision tree on how to navigate through the books on the NPR’s top 100 list. I thought it was cool, so I wanted to share.

 

I previously commented in my post about installing Google Analytics that I was splitting the focus of this blog. Amanda Luedeke guest-posted 5 Rules of Blogging Well and I break one of them. #1 Stick to the goal; the problem is, I don’t really have a specific goal (notice the title of the blog?) The blog operates mostly as an open notebook. I sometimes will come back to it and search for some bit of history or technical trivia I’m looking for. Sometimes I post links to music, sometimes I post something about books, sometimes it’s about writing and sometimes it’s about my work.

So the question I have for you, my reader, is what do you come to this blog for? If you come for information about Nortel/Avaya, what would you like to see more posts on? If you come for topics related to writing, what would you like more of? (If you come for the music links, I’m sorry =)

 

On Tuesday, the Authors Guild posted the following article on its blog. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the ways in which the book business is changing, and how we reached the point where a single retailer has the power to dictate terms to publishers, and thus, indirectly, to authors and readers.

Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory

via Victoria Strauss at SWFA.org.

I can’t say it better than Victoria did, so I won’t try.

 

I’ve seen a lot of articles recently about the self-publishing, e-publishing, e-pub bubble and indie vs traditional. I’m from Team Trad-pub and believe that traditional publishing has a lot of value.

… There’s the Big Names In Trad Publishing who use that name recognition and their financial gains from said recognition to springboard self-pub projects–and that’s another thing, a professional writer with connections to editing and experience with the publishing process and what makes a quality project is NOT going to have “typical” results. They have experience they have invested in it, and it shows. Results. Not. Typical. Okay?

Muddy, uncritical thinking is not your friend when it comes to writing or business, or the business of writing and publishing. And, frankly, these are the kinds of discussions and numbers I’d love to see more of when it comes to talking about self-pub, instead of the usual round of Internet hateration and shaking pitchforks at mythical “gatekeepers”.

Self Publishing Takeaway Game | Lilith Saintcrow

Lilith provides some wonderful and much needed clarity on the Team Self-pub vs Team Trad-pub debate. I’d even go so far as to point out that there are people who have never made it big in traditional publishing who have contacts and experience, and put out a superior self-pub product (compared to every other indie out there). I won’t link to Joe Konrath because he’s a conceited, egotistical asshat who minimizes the contribution that 26 years in the traditional publishing industry has towards his current self-pub success. He’s a perfect example of someone who provides muddy, uncritical arguments in favor of epublishing. What he provides is anecdotal evidence and calls it science.

  • He’s got a lot of stories he’s shopped to traditional publishers over the last 26 years, and after failing to make a success out of them via the traditional publishing route, he decided to self publish.
  • He talks about how he’s playing the market (using the opportunities provided by the recent boom in Amazon Kindle sales), and figuring out how to game the system (lowering the price on his book to zero, then selling many copies at zero so that he can return the book to regular price and reap $100k per month).
  • His numbers are not typical, and he doesn’t present sound advice on how to replicate his experience. It’s great that he’s having success, but he is by no means the typical experience.
  • He’s also got 26 years experience in traditional publishing, networking with editors, artists and readers and he’s spent that 26 years honing his craft. It’s not surprising that his writing would be above-average when compared to the typical self-pub author, or that his covers would be above average– hell that his entire product is above average. But he can hardly claim (with any hope of believability to an unbiased observer) that he’s not where he is now because he went the traditional publishing route.

With that said, I’d have given him the same advice I give to anyone else. If you shop work to all the big name publishers and they don’t take it, but you believe strongly in it (and you do, or you wouldn’t have written it and tried to shop it out), then you should consider self publishing. But, there are reasons why self-publishing isn’t for everyone.

The Big Reasons Indie Authors Aren’t Taken Seriously | Huffington Post

1. Bad editing – Let’s face it, there’s a reason that indie books are stereotyped as trash. Sometimes the indie author won’t murder their darlings, filling their stories with bad puns or cliche. Sometimes they are so caught up in their story they can’t see the continuity errors, they’re simply too close to their own work to self-edit. Sometimes they just write bad prose.

2. Quantity over quality – No author is able to write prose that does not have the occasional mistake. Rapidly written books are going to have errors that need editing. Certainly you may produce fewer errors with more experience, but that’s true in any field. If you’ve spent 10,000 hours on a topic you’re bound to be an expert. Being an expert doesn’t mean you don’t still make mistakes (it just means you get to feel more embarrassed when you do.) This almost (but not quite) is a duplicate of the editing topic– but it extends beyond the topics covered in the Huffington Post article. You also have things like cover art, variety of formats (hardback doesn’t come cheaply or easily to the self-pub.)

3. Lack of gatekeepers – No one credible is reviewing their work. There are places out there to get indie work reviewed, but most people won’t take the time or make the effort. And why should they? Indie authors are frequently temperamental, sensitive and prone to vicious personal attacks when their work is poorly reviewed. Just google search review websites and you’ll see most places have a policy against reviewing self-pubbed work, and they almost always have the same experiences. That’s not to say that all indie authors are the same, but enough are that they spoil the opportunities for mature and respectful indie authors.

4. Crappy Covers – Few indie authors are going to have the artistic connections that a Trad-pub has for generating cover art. Even fewer will consider spending the up-front cost of buying/making good cover art before their book is published and makes enough money. (The goal is, after all, to put money in the author’s pocket, not take money out.)

There’s a theme there, if you didn’t see it. It basically comes down to two factors: words in print, cover on book.

Sometimes starting small is the best strategy.

It’s not always about the money | Rachelle Gardner

There’s a lot of emotional luggage associated with publishing. Just as the genre and literary types are often at each other’s throats, its pretty obvious the self-pub and trad-pub types are at each others throats. There’s a lot of change happening in a short amount of time, and epublishing is currently benefiting from it, and benefiting quite a lot. Take, for instance, Joe Konrath (with his $100k per month paycheck spikes due to recent booms in Kindle ereader sales), or Amanda Hocking (who leveraged her self-pub success in to a traditional contract). They’re not the norm, but successes are definitely out there.

Sometimes starting small is the best strategy, whether it be in self-pub or in trad-pub. Sometimes getting a small contract, and building your career as you write (and hone your craft) is the best thing. Sometimes sacrificing the traditional route and putting yourself out there is the best thing. It’s difficult to say what’s best for any one person, because it depends on what you’re doing and where your skills are. If you take the time to put together a professional product, even if you skimp on some things like cover art, and you learn how to play the Amazon marketing game then you might be a huge success. Whether you stay a success is dependent upon a lot of facts– do you have 26 years worth of stories written that you can continue to feed the consumer? If so, staying self-pub is probably best for you. If not, you might find traditional publishing to be educational enough to be worth the journey.

The one thing that Joe Konrath likes to minimize is his 26 years of experience. While I’ve not read a lot from Amanda Hocking, it’s important to note that she had seventeen novels written before she self-published. Seventeen novels represents a significant investment in developing her skills as a writer. She didn’t self-publish her first novel and become a huge success. She’s also not trying to convince everyone that self-publishing is the future (she

Konrath is a huge believer in the future of epublishing, so much so that he’s attempting to debunk the theory that we’re in the middle of an epublishing bubble:

The self-epublishing bubble | Ewan Morrison

Is epublishing the next bubble industry? | LitReactor

The Ewan Morrison article is lengthy and well worth the read. The second link refers to the first and adds a nice summary, in case you don’t want to take the time to read the whole article. The part that really got me about Ewan Morrison’s take on the self-epublishing bubble was the idea that digital self-publishing is nothing more than a ponzi scheme:

The now ex-self-epublished authors decide not to publish again (it was a strain anyway, and it was made harder by the fact that they weren’t paid for their work and had to work after hours while doing another job – and they realised that self-promoting online would have to be a full-time job.) They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be “creative”. They also become disillusioned with their ereaders, which are now out of date anyway. And so they return to the mainstream publishers to look for culture. Unfortunately, as a result of the ebook market implosion it is impossible for publishers to push their prices back up to pre-bubble levels (from 99p to £12.99), and so their infrastructure continues to decline. And since they have decided to look for new talent in self-epublishing, they are trapped in the very same bubble that everyone else is trying to get out of.

This is the theorized end result of the bubble, but what’s more telling are the guesstimated numbers presented as anecdotal evidence:

… After a long year of trying to sell self-epublished books, attempting to self-promote on all available networking sites, and realising that they have been in competition with hundreds of thousands of newcomers just like them, the vast majority of the newly self-epublished authors discover that they have sold less than 100 books each. They then discover that this was in fact the business model of Amazon and other epub platforms in the first place: a model called “the long tail”. With five million new self-publishing authors selling 100 books each, Amazon has shifted 500m units. While each author – since they had to cut costs to 99p – has made only £99 after a year’s work. Disillusionment sets in as they realise that they were sold an idea of success which could, by definition, not possibly be extended to all who were willing to take part.

Amazon gets 40% of your ebook price when the price is 99c or less. If those numbers are realistic (and they may not be anything more than hyperbole, but let’s use them anyway), then 500 million units moved represents $200,000,000 for Amazon and $99 for the author simply because Amazon moved the volume and took a slice out of every author’s 99c pie.

Franzen says ebooks are the worst | LitReactor

I’m definitely not one of the Luddites (as the epub crusaders like to accuse the detractors of being): I have a Kindle Fire, and the first thing I did was download over 100 free books (the books that are in the public domain, but available from Amazon for free) and bought a half dozen others. I spend a little bit of time every day with my ereader, and when I next go on vacation, I will have that thing in my carry-on luggage. I’m also not a believer in the idea that the ereader will replace printed books. I still love the printed page, and for my home library (books I love), having a physical copy is still a romantic experience.

More to the point, I see a danger in treating literature (i.e., books) as a commodity that should be price-raced to the bottom. I also see a danger in ebook pricing where book buyers are encouraged to become bargain hunters on literature, only buying when the price of the book becomes free.

Amazon’s practices aren’t going unquestioned, B&N will not stock (printed) titles published by Amazon. I hate B&N and frankly I’m applauding right now. I’m applauding so much I’m rethinking my book buying habits.

Of course, I’m also going on a Books & Chocolate crawl later in February. I’m hoping to buy a few books while I’m burning calories (and consuming them).

 

Wired Magazine posted a interesting (if long winded) article about High-Powered Plasma Turns Garbage Into Gas. The nutshell version of this article is that a chemist, who used to work with nuclear waste, pioneered a method of reducing residential waste to a synthetic gas. The trash is then exposed to plasma (and an electrical current) which causes the atoms in the trash to merge with the gas to create a synthetic gas which can be burned as a fuel. Any atoms that fail to bond are then isolated within a glass structure. If the chemist who started this venture is right, we should see trash become reusable in the next decade or two as effectively renewable fuel.

 

I am very excited to announce that Tricia, my shiny new agent, is willing to read any/all entries in a query/250-word submission window From Feb. 13-17. Erin Murphy Literary Agency does not accepted unsolicited queries so this is your in, folks.

via Forever Rewrighting: Upcoming pitch contest with Tricia Lawrence of EMLA.

Not my genre, but I hope Melodie’s contest has a big turn out. If you write in the genre that Tricia likes (see Melodie’s website for more information and links), consider applying.

 
This chapter is one of my favorite in the novel. Daetrin awakens from near death and is introduced to Kiri, the Marra, our Marra. Kiri begins revealing the relationship between Daetrin and the Marra race, and Daetrin accepts challenge of defeating the Priest-Marra of Cantona.

C.S. Friedman’s The Madness Season Chapter 15.

Daetrin awakens in the Honaqa Gorge. A brief exchange between a young woman we don’t immediately recognize and Daetrin takes place, in Greek, and then Daetrin is pushed back in to unconsciousness (to facilitate healing.) The young woman (later to be named Kiri) awakens Daetrin long enough to feed him her blood, then he passes out again. He awakens again, and this time he’s stronger but still severely wounded.

… She had drawn me against her, and her offer was unmistakable. It was there in the scent of her flesh, in the pounding of her blood beneath her skin, so close against my face. I felt the last vestiges of my self-control slipping away into darkness, and I lacked the strength—and the desire—to fight for its return

Who are you?

What are you?

Why?

How many year had it been, since I had last tasted human blood? Even in the Time Before that was a rare occurrence; I would no more have forced that attention upon a woman than I would any other violent hunger. Animal blood had sufficed for me, as it did for most of my kind. And I had forgotten. The intoxication of feeding on one’s own kind. The heady flavor of human life. The feel of a woman’s body in my arms, and the heat of her blood as I drank it in—the scent of her, so very female, which awakened other hungers—the need to hold her, to drink her in, until my body shivered in pleasure, my desperate hunger reduced to mere desire. I had forgotten there was anything like this … and maybe, in fact, I had never known. What human woman could ever have given herself in this way, with so little fear of consequence?

Again Kiri and Daetrin talk. She explains the nature of the Marra and then asks him the nature of his kind. He is embodied (not Marra), she is not. There’s more, but you should read it yourself. A lot of dialogue that gives you subtle hints; Kiri seems vulnerable despite being Daetrin’s healer and protector.

Then, when Daetrin awakes, he is alone.

Terrible emptiness inside me: I convinced myself that it was only hunger, a physical yearning, and had nothing to do with my isolation. It was good to be free of fear for once, with no one to answer to but myself. No aliens to analyze, no humans to deceive, no home to worry about defending. Nothing to save, or abandon. An animal freedom, dream-pure. It was a welcome relief.

Wasn’t it?

And when Daetrin takes the form of a cat (he’s always near his original mass when he shape-shifts) and encounters Kiri, in the shape of a mountain cat.

Which is when I heard the other cat coming. I drew myself back and hissed, an instinctive reaction; hunting cats defend their solitude with vigor. But I wasn’t prepared for what bounded out at me, with such playful enthusiasm that I was knocked back onto my haunches in surprise, all my hostility suddenly deflated.

It was a mountain cat, female, smaller than myself, in that stage of life just past kittenhood. And I would like to say that I knew what it really was because my senses were so keen, or my reasoning so sound. Or because my cat-body could pick up the scent of alienness that surrounded her, or some similarly impressive accomplishment. But the truth was simply that she still had human eyes—the same human eyes—and the chestnut fur with russet tipping, that perfectly matched the shade of her human hair.

The cat psyche is a straightforward thing, infinitely simpler than its human counterpart. In it there is no conflict of id or superego, no wrestling of divergent emotions, no clouding of issues with intellectual complexity. As a man, I would have greeted her return with misgivings, any hint of happiness stifled by my concern over her nature and purpose. And alarm at her shapechanging. But as a cat I was simply glad to see her, my joy unfettered by human concerns. And I think it showed.

She padded near to where I stood, and extended her nose for perusal. I sniffed her gingerly, knowing that feline instinct was wary of any new scent. But her sent was arm, encouraging … even mildly arousing. It circumvented the biochemical channels that warned of danger and left, in its wake, an offer of companionship.

Later, after hunting, they talk again.

“You are feeling better?” she asked.

It occurred to me suddenly that she really didn’t know the full extent of what she’d done. And how could she, when even I barely understood it?

“You saved my life,” I said quietly. With as much gratitude in my voice as that one phrase could contain. And hunted with me, which no woman has done in centuries. Memories arose within me, painful and compelling. Brigid. Bianca. Yolanda. For a moment I was lost, hunting in those other times. Feeling the pain all over again, as fate took each companion from me. And the loneliness—always the loneliness.

The chapter concludes with Daetrin agreeing to follow Kiri to Suyaag, the human capital of Meyaga, once he has freed Cantona from the Priest-Marra.

Concluding this chapter, we end with the following hooks:

  • Daetrin feels an emotional/sexual bond to Kiri as a result of her feeding him “human” blood, and because of her hunting with him. What’s going to happen between then?
  • Daetrin commits to traveling to Suyaag with Kiri, a merging of purpose. What will this mean for Daetrin’s future?
  • Daetrin commits to expelling the Priest-Marra from Cantona. Will he succeed?

Stakes: Free the Cantonan people from the Priest-Marra, learn his abilities, test himself before he proceeds with his fight against the Tyr.

 
I’ve been a little lax with posting my reviews. I’m going to try to catch up this weekend, get a few scheduled in advance.

In this very short chapter, we evaluate a flashback moment. Based on context, it must be Daetrin’s POV. He’s in a church, during an era when there is a Plague.

C.S. Friedman’s The Madness Season Chapter 14.

From a purely informational basis, this page-and-a-half chapter adds nothing to the story. (Really, it doesn’t.) The narrative is historical, it presents a time in the POVC’s life when they are living in a community that has been struck by the Plague. They are trying to establish themselves within the community, and they are faced with a priest who conducts a ritual (communion and consumption of the Body and the Blood of Christ).

Informationally we are presented with:

  • His mother was a priestess and oracle (possibly predating Alexandria.)
  • His father was a scholar of Alexandria, trading his knowledge for acceptance (and other necessities and luxuries.)

The timing of the piece is indistinct. There’s a lot of periods when the Plague ran rampant through the world. The was an epidemic in Asia in the late 1800s that even made its way to California via Hawaii. Based on what we know, it would have had to have been late 1800s to early 1900s. The one thing I found when looking up information on the Plague is that it did not reach the same level of severity in Europe that it did in Asia— and because of the lack of specifics we can’t know where we are, or when we are.

What the timefugue does do though is set the mood. We know that Daetrin fell off a cliff and nearly died (it was possible he died, but unlikely… he is the protagonist after all.)

There are thematic similarities between the last chapter and this one. The hostile community. Daetrin’s attempts to fit in (but the conclusion of this chapter says he never fits in). The priest. The chapter moves the mood and pacing from Daetrin’s attempt to flee (and near death experience) to something more claustrophobic. In this scene/chapter, we’re not shown anything outside of the church and we’re told little more. There’s a sense of brooding danger, hidden just out of site.

I’m left with the conclusion that the point of this scene is to draw back from the fast pacing of Daetrin fleeing and transition to a lower paced scene.

Concluding this chapter, we end with the following hooks: None, this short chapter suggests that Daetrin is not dead.

Stakes: None.

 

People always tell you that writing is a finan­cially fraught life, but folks rarely explain the down-in-the-weeds details of how they sur­vive. I guess this is the blog post I would have liked to have read a few years back, when I was plan­ning out how I’d make a go of it if I ever got a book deal.

via How I make it work . . . | Myke Cole.

Since I’m interested in writing (maybe not for a living anytime soon, but eventually, closer to retirement), stories like this one (where Myke Cole talks about how he’s budgeting to follow his dream of writing) are very helpful. By comparison you get some self-pubbed authors (who I will no longer link to) who talk on-and-on about the joy of Amazon self-publishing strategies. While that may work for those people, when they have a publishing history that goes back twenty-six years (and starts in traditionally published books), it’s very hard to attribute their success solely to the self-pub revolution they’re going on about. And for that reason, I really appreciate these more realistic presentations of what it takes to make a living as a writer.

Jeff C. Hines also posted enlightening numbers recently, showing that over his nine year career in writing, he’s made less than $20,000 for six out of the last nine years. He opines “I’m at the point in my writing career where, based on the past four years, I’d give serious consideration to quitting the day job … if I had a reasonable source of health insurance for my family. Since I don’t, I’m still not in a position where I can write full time.” The point about life insurance is a reasonable one. For myself, living in the San Francisco Bay Area where the average Silicon Valley salary tops $100,000 means I have a number of expenses that aren’t present in other parts of the country, or rather, I have the same expenses, but at much higher rates. (For instance, I pay close to $30K per year in rent, the average is around $27K per year. There’s just no way I could live off Jeff Hine’s writing income without giving up all sorts of luxuries, like food.) Focus put together a fantastic infographic that shows how a fictional employee’s $92K salary in Silicon Valley had the same buying power as a $59K salary in San Diego.

I expect to have retirement income later in life, so I expect to be more in Myke Cole’s position than Mr Hine’s. (And that’s another scary point, if you’re making less than $30,000 on average, what do you do for retirement?)

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