Progress, I makes it.

It’s taken all week, but I finally think I’m getting the hang of this new life. Last week was all about figuring out just how much other shit can eat into my day when I don’t have a day job. This week has been about actually getting shit done.

So far this week I’ve –

Finished and submitted a short story to a steampunk anthology

Finished the novella about the teenage assassin, Cindy Slaughter (now a nickname based on your preferences)

Gotten to within spitting distance of finishing the rough draft of Black Knight IV: Paint it Black. I’m well into Act III of the book at this point, and expect to be done with it before I fly to Vegas next Friday.

Written more words of fiction than I did in all of March. Not that my word count for April is impressive (about 22K so far), but March sucked out loud, what with travel and illness and all that jazz.

Finally gotten around to listing the Big Bad anthology with Duotrope. If you’re a writer and you’re submitting work to anthologies and magazines, Duotrope is the best resource in the world. And now that I’ve listed the anthology on there, I’ve gotten more submissions in 48 hours than I did in the first 12 weeks submissions were open.

Gotten back to reviewing submissions for Red Dirt Review. I’d gotten ahead, then gotten behind again. Now I’ll spend time this weekend catching up.

Registered for the NAB conference so that I can get this marketing business rolling.

Edited a revision of Genesis that I should have done before I put the book on sale. But I suck, so that didn’t happen.

Planned out bad guys for the next dozen or more Bubba stories, insuring that I have no BS writer’s block excuse to keep me from churning words with that character.

Started planting the seeds for a longer Bubba story, or at least a bigger arc that explains how he came to be a Monster Hunter, what makes him the way he is, and why he likes strippers so much. But really, there are pretty obvious reasons he likes strippers. They’re called boobs.

Next on the plate is dealing with COBRA, getting a crown on one tooth (yay!), dealing with cashing out my 401(k) (yes, I know the penalties, but I also know what I make and how long it will take for my income to catch up to my expenses, so cashing out the 401(k) is a big part of this career change plan, and getting on the artist’s calendar to get my phoenix tattoo finished up.

Then I go to Vegas next Friday. Lemme know if you’ll be there then, we should grab a drink.

March is for Monsters Giveaway winners and Con Updates!

Check out the widget for the winners! Entering enough times to flood the system certainly worked for JK, who picked up one of EVERY PRIZE! Thanks to everyone who entered, I appreciate your help in spreading the word about my work. I’ll be doing another giveaway in the next few months, so stay tuned for that! All the books will go out by mid-next week, because I leave for Vegas at the end of the week, and want to get all that off my plate before I fly.

I’m still adjusting to life without a day job. I still sit in front of a computer for most of the day, and it still starts at about the same time, but I will admit that there are days that I don’t put on pants until well after noon. This being one of those days. It’s a perk, I’ll admit it. I broke down and bought a new MacBook Air, which I love. It’s crazy fast, and all my stuff transferred over almost seamlessly using Migration Assistant. The only thing it looks like I lost was the saved games in Zuma’s Revenge, so I guess I’ll just have to make my little frog burp up a lot more balls and reclaim my accolades.

Still working on the weight thing – I’m cutting back on portions and cutting back on sodas, so I think I’ve lost a few pounds. Nothing spectacular, but it’s a slow process. I figure in this time of life change if I can lose a couple pounds a month that’ll be a miracle, especially as much as I’m traveling over the next few weeks.

To that end, here’s a list of where I’ll be the next few months if you want to say hello. If you live in any of these areas and want a hard copy of a book, let me know and I’ll pack some, even if I’m not coming to a book show. And I’m always happy to meet folks in a bar or casino to chat about writing, the characters, whatever. If you’re interested in meeting me and hanging out, please don’t be shy. I love to talk about writing, literature, all of it.

April 13-17 – Las Vegas, Nevada – National Association of Broadcasters. I’m staying at the Excalibur and plan to play the Venetian Deep Stacks on Saturday and Sunday. Then I’ll be pitching my new marketing firm at NAB during the week. I’m totally available for drinks in the evening.

April 20-22 – Batesville, Arkansas – Pulp Ark 2012. I’m driving for two days to get to this convention featuring the best new pulp writers and fans in the nation! Come on out if you’re in the Mid-South area. I’ll be stopping in Nashville on the way, so if you wanna get a beer there, let me know.

April 27-29 – Wilkesboro, NC – Merlefest. The only exception to the “I’ll bring books anywhere” rule. I’ll be on a mountain listening to boogie. You’re welcome to listen with me. And chat. But there’s no booze at the festival, and I’ll conduct no business there. It’s a family vacation, and a semi-holy spot for me. You’re all invited, it’s a great time. But no business that weekend :).

May I’ll be buried in a couple of theatres. I’m designing 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for Theatre Charlotte, then I go straight into the theatre for the Blumey Awards, a new awards show the big performing arts center in town is hosting to celebrate regional high school theatres. That’s got me booked most of the first three weeks of May.

June is back on the con circuit, kicking off with ConCarolinas here in Charlotte June 1-3. I’ll be hanging out with my Magical Words friends and plenty of other cool folk, so come on by! It’s an excellent mid-sized con for writers.

June 22-24 I’ll be at the Charlotte Convention Center for HeroesCon 2012, one of the largest comic book conventions in the US each year. I’ll be sharing a table with Stuart Jaffe and Tamsin Silver, so come say hi! I’m counting on them to wrestle me to the ground and keep me away from the other vendors so I might actually make a profit this year instead of spending all my money on comics.

Then at the end of June I’m heading to Louisville for what is shaping up to be one of the best cons of the year – Fandom Fest. Stephen Zimmer is putting together some of the best panels I’ve ever seen at a con, and the guest list is super-badass! With guests of honor like Richard Kadreay (Sandman Slim), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Robin Hobb (too many to list), Jim Hines, Julie Kagawa and others, not to mention media guests like Bruce Campbell, James Marsters and Sean Astin, this is going to be an awesome show.

That gets me to the July 4th weekend, when I plan to collapse for a few days. I’m currently only scheduled for one con in July and then DragonCon, so I might be looking for a beach house to hole up in and write for the month of August. Hope to see you around one of these events!

I promise I’m not dead, just retired

I promise I’m not dead, just retired

Well, for a week or two the jury was kinda out. But here’s a brief recap of what’s been going on since I’ve been out gallivanting around and doing a piss-poor job of telling anyone where I am or if I’m alive.

I went to the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Chattanooga for the 19th consecutive year. It was pretty apropos that I essentially ended my career with Barbizon at this conference, since it was at this conference in Norfolk, Virginia in 1995 where I first heard of Barbizon and met anyone from there. A year later in Louisville, KY I was working in the Barbizon booth!

Some of my best friends in the world were there, and my buddy T-Bone bought what amounted to a bottle of Patron to do a round of shots on Friday night. If you ever stay in Chattanooga for anything, I highly recommend the Chattanoogan. The rooms are lovely, and Alan the cocktail server was amazing. Which reminds me, I need to send him a book for taking such good care of us all weekend. We ended up with twenty people outside by the fire pit on Friday night because it was a lovely night and the band sucked. That marked another first for me – we helped get the house band fired because they were absolutely dreadful. The above pic if just a few folks that were part of the toast, but I wanted to commemorate them here. Thanks to Jeremy K for the pic.

Then I came home and turned up with bronchitis. This happens to me once a year or so ever since I caught pneumonia a few years back. My lungs are a little sensitive, and if I try to go too long without reasonable rest (like doing StellarCon then working a week and doing SETC right behind it), I get sick. This was a doozy, too. I ended up flat on my back for a solid week, and barely recovered for the following week. I was sick enough that it was Wednesday of MidSouth Con before I was 100% sure I was going to Memphis. I watched a lot of Supernatural, broke down and went to the doctor, got some antibiotics that kinda worked, got some hydrocodone-laced cough syrup that certainly made me feel better, then went to see John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett in concert.

Or at least most of John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett in concert. I’d paid a lot of money for those tickets, and there was no way I was staying home, but I only lasted about 2/3 of the show before it got too warm in the theatre and my cough came back with a vengeance. But they were still amazing, and I highly recommend their acoustic set to anyone, especially if you can see them in a converted church that still has the antique Tiffany stained glass windows. But I might be a little spoiled seeing as many shows at Spirit Square as I have. For those of you that have read Back in Black, yes, Spirit Square is a real place, and it’s one of my favorite concert venues ever. If you’re in Charlotte for anything, I highly recommend seeing a show there.

Then I went back to bed for most of a week. Then I tried to get moving again, because I still had a couple days’ worth of my notice to work out, an office to clean, and another con to attend. But more on that later. Now I’m up, I’m healthy (ish) and it’s time to get some writing done!

Guest Post – KJ Hannah Greenberg – State of the Short Story Market

KJ Hannah Greenberg has a new book out called Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things. Check it out and check out her views on the short story market today. I’ll be back tomorrow with photos from the last couple of weeks and stories from my fevered hallucinations while high on cough syrup.

Given the advent of convergent media and their impact on the world of publishing, these days, editors and writers agree that the contemporary short story market is much like the seemingly amorphic colossus described in “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” More explicitly, whereas groups or individual gatekeepers and creatives get the gist of some aspects of this bold, new bazaar, no one understands this souk in its entirety.

Contemporary social expectations have evolved alongside of contemporary telecommunications, too, in a race to determine not who has the most toys, but, furthermore, whose toys are the shiniest. In simple terms, burgeoning innovation has complicated the industry. Championship, to a significant degree, has become a guessing game. It seems, nowadays, that it’s better to be morphed into a gelatinous wildebeest, transported to Planet Nine, or else exposed to outer world experiences than to win a Pushcart Prize or National Endowment for the Humanities monies. Fortunately, feelings are not facts.

What continues to be true is that “the rules” have been vaporized. In their place sit poorly fitting literary brannocks. At the same time as meagerly fashioned fluff rules “popular,” i.e. mass market publications, the literary and the pulp markets, the publishing world’s extremes, respectively, are shifting. No longer do writers sell only science-based speculative fiction. Instead, we sell an array of imaginary stuff including, but not limited to: alternate history, bizarre fiction, cross-genre fiction, cyberpunk, slipstream fiction, soft science fiction, steam punk, and weird tales.

Despite this upheaval in what constitutes content fit to be marketed, we writers, and the folk who befriend us, remain motivated to broadcast patterned words. Presently, electronic and audio venues vie with traditional print forums for the best short fiction. Roll call URLs such as Ralan’s SpecFic & Humor Webstravaganza and Duotrope’s Digest  help established and emerging writers, alike, find homes for their short works.

When assessing the short story market, in addition, it behooves us to appreciate that writers are no more likely to make a living being word players today than we were ten or one hundred years ago. Most short stories authors sagaciously keep their day jobs. Despite the fact that odd ducks, because of merit, fortune, or both, make five and six digits on works issued by traditional presses, by print on demand presses, or by vanity and self-publishing presses, most skilled folk are happy to get, if not membership in SFWA, then bylines at respectable locations.

All things considered, even the end that is peer recognition is not freely given.  Half of the problem is the tonnage of garbage that gets mindlessly submitted to people populating mastheads (I can vouch for this phenomenon since I edit for Bound Off and for Bewildering Stories). Many newbies, but also a good per cent of older, cantankerous sorts, think it costs nothing for them to submit, at the touch of their keypad, work to multiple outlets, and to do so simultaneously; they forget someone has to read the received work.

The other half of the problem is the half-baked efforts offered up by otherwise good writers coupled with the diminishing energies available from good periodicals’ exhausted staffs (see above for the rationale for droopy masthead members). Although getting published takes more than a roll of the dice, it can be very confounding either to find a welcome mat or to find work worth welcoming.

What’s more, not each and every published morsel is created equally. I remember, during my stint as a literary critic at Tangent, feeling loss at the nearly formulaic, i.e. safe for sales, nature of most of the stories that managed to squeak onto the pages of renowned magazines. Fortunately, we have places as Critters.org, where “the best and the brightest,” alongside of newcomers unafraid of risks, send their work for peer feedback. I’ve enjoyed proportionately more of that latter group of manuscripts, bumps, warts, and so forth, then the methodically published, albeit technically “well written” stuff splat on the big guys’ pages.

Auxiliary to the aforementioned, in publishing, as in many other industries, the socio-economic activity of networking counts. Publishers who enjoy their authors’ work often open back doors for them. Less frequently, but more astonishingly, publishers invite their favorite writers to contribute tales. In my own modest experience, I’ve enjoyed both modes of getting my writing into print. I’m disinclined, however, to name where I enjoy such accommodations.

Related to the boons of networking are the drawbacks of scams. From publishers who insist that their naïve contributor must buy copies of anthologies, in which those writers’ work is presented, to broadcasters who create unrealistic literary contests, money is being made from the energies of innocent writers. Watchdogs such as Preditors [sic] and Editors and such as Absolute Write Water Cooler exist, yet writing remains a “sellers beware” business.

More exactingly, we live in a span during which base individuals have no compunction preying on we creatives’ longing for success. Just as labdanum was produced mainly for the perfume industry, but was used, by unscrupulous sorts, as an adhesive for royalties’ fake facial hair, Internet opportunities have both multiplied writing outlets and have attracted hoards of nasties. It’s of small wonder that some writers prefer to obsess over pretend beasts than to struggle to get our short works to audiences.

Nonetheless, in the end, we writers can’t help but respond to our urge to reveal, to scrutinize, and to gather together fantastic moments, no matter the state of the publishing industry, specifically, or of the economy, in general. Writers write and will often do amazing things to make sure that their readers can read.

As for me, I confess to continuing to be incorrigible when it comes to generating texts. Happily, my gatekeepers and readers encourage me to do more of the same. To wit, my latest book, Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things, published by Bards & Sages Publishing, was born.

When readers find that their work day has diminished their endorphins, that they need a new reason to slip under the covers with a flashlight, or that they simply want to laugh a loud, a bit more, they ought to open Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things. This book’s anthropomorphic tales are populated with: spacelings, with anxiety-prone rabbits, and with literate penguins. This collection of seventy yarns includes stories of: postpartum tree hoppers with libido problems, multi-headed aliens intent on altering Earth’s fiduciary systems, couch potatoes on notice for otherworlders’ attack, and juvenile chimera chicks tilting against human culture’s prejudices. Besides being good for a few hours’ worth of entertainment, the existence of Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things demonstrates that writers can find means to broadcast their musings in this upside down, contemporary short story market.

 

About the Author:

KJ Hannah Greenberg has met few imaginary friends with whom she hasn’t wanted to consort. Her short, speculative fiction, particularly, blows bubbles at many addresses, including at: AlienSkin Magazine, AntipodeanSF, Big Pulp, Danse Macabre, Morpheus Tales, Strange, Weird and Wonderful, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and Weirdyear. More globally, her short fiction can be found at dozens of outlets, including at: American MENSA’s Calliope, Fiction365, The Medulla Review, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Raphael’s Village. Look for her online, “Jewish” Science Fiction, writing class this May.

Randumb House hates libraries, and other stupid publisher news

I try not to be one of those indie authors that’s constantly bitching about the Big Six, especially since I don’t have a deal with them and have no inside knowledge, but some days it’s hard. Today is one of those days, so you get a full-on publishing rant.

First, this story from Digital Shift is a must-read. Randumb House has decided, in their finite wisdom, that since libraries are one of the largest groups of book buyers in the US, that they should pay TRIPLE the cover price for their ebooks. The statements from Randumb basically sum up as “because you can lend it, you should pay more.” I’m sure there are issues of publishers losing some revenue with an infinitely lendable item, such as an ebook, as opposed to a lendable item that wears out over time, like a print book. But really, do you need to TRIPLE the price? For the institutions that provide books to people who often can’t afford to buy the books new in the first place? It seems horribly misguided to me.

Another thing that seems misguided is backlist pricing from publishers. I wanted to buy a copy of a thriller last week. This book was first released in 1997 or so, and probably released in ebook within the last five years. The mass market paperback price – $7.99. The ebook price – $9.99.

I don’t think so.

I understand paying a premium for portability. I understand paying a premium to be the first one to read a book, thus the higher price for hardback. But backlist books are the books that you’ve already made your money on once. Or twice. Or in the case of this book, which was made into a movie, several times over. A fellow panelist at StellarCon brought up a good point that the cost of ebook conversion of backlist titles is a new cost, so that piece of overhead has yet to be absorbed. Which is valid.

But ebook conversion is cheap. Just a couple hundred dollars at worst. So pricing the ebook at $2 more than the mass market paperback is downright silly. It’s one of those things that makes you rail against traditional publishers, makes indies like me all look like we’re anti-publishing, which we aren’t (not all of us), and makes publishers look like assholes.

I don’t believe that Randumb House hates libraries, but I think somebody there is making a terrible decision. I don’t think that their backlist pricing is highway robbery, but I think somebody there is making a terrible decision. And maybe some of the folks making decisions about publishing oughta get out of New York once in a while and hang out with folks in the rest of the country to get some perspective. Because if you’re making all your business decisions based on life on one small island, you’re probably missing the other 290 million people in the country’s point of view.