Year: 2013 (page 59 of 66)

As you well know, I tend to hang out here at Ye Olde Bloggeryville five out of seven days, which means I write somewhere around 250 posts in a given year, which further means that I am in near-constant danger of burning myself out of compelling topics.

That brings me to you once again where I shake you by your collar and say, “GIVE ME STUFF TO TALK ABOUT OR I’LL SHRIVEL UP AND DIE LIKE A BUG IN THE SUN.”

Meaning, what do you want from me here at the site? What topics — writing-related or otherwise — do you want to see me cover? Do you have questions you’d like answered? Fling anything and everything at my head. No guarantees I’ll end up talking about it (sometimes people suggest topics and, honestly, I got nuthin’), but I’d still like you to help me out.

Or, y’know, don’t help me out, at which point you’ll start getting posts that are ASCII drawings of penises. Or I may just type up the menus to the local take-out joints we use.

(For those who want me to talk about point-of-view in fiction, that one’s coming tomorrow.)

Thanks in advance for your suggestions, kind readers of this blog, whatever you’re called.

#highfive

Last week’s challenge: “A Story In Three Haiku“

Gaze upon these Russian photos.

Some of them are pretty bizarre; some of them less so.

But there’s a lot of story in these images.

Today’s challenge is simple:

Choose one and use it as inspiration for your story.

You don’t need to set your stories in Russia, obviously. If one story somehow leads you to writing about a space station powered by two dogs “doin’ it” (seriously, look at the photos and you’ll see what I mean), hey, whatever. More power to you. These photos are jumping off points.

Make sure to tell us what photo you’re using. Write the story at your blog or other online space. Link back here in the comments.

You’ve got 1000 words. Any genre will do.

Due by Friday, 2/15, noon EST.

Atlanta Burns is a character near and dear to my heart. As a troubled teen trying to make things right in a world gone wrong, she deals with issues that still sit uncomfortably in my gut: bullying and high school and abuse and all the other bruises and brands of youth.

I was fortunate enough to write her in a novella, Shotgun Gravy, that I was happy with — and I was doubly fortunate to be able to continue her adventures in the follow-up novel, Bait Dog. That second fortune thanks to the fine Kickstarter backers who helped make it happen.

Well, turns out, I may be triply fortunate when it comes to Atlanta Burns.

Amazon Children’s Publishing has offered to help bring Atlanta Burns to a wider audience.

They will be printing both Shotgun Gravy and Bait Dog in a single volume, and then will follow-up by publishing a second novel (once titled Harum Scarum, but now called Frack You). Kickstarter backers will still be named in the print volume, and will also receive an autographed print copy of the second book (rather than a digital copy).

Obviously, I’m hella excited — this is for me a new lease on life for the character, and I think it bodes well for her future that the publisher was just in love with her as I was. Amazon Children’s Publishing is also the publisher of my upcoming YA series (the Heartland trilogy, beginning with Under the Empyrean Sky), and they’ve been kick-ass so far. They’ve given great edits and have a  strong grasp of the characters and the worldbuilding, not to mention their support — they’ve been very author-friendly. Needless to say I’m thrilled to have Atlanta Burns come to them as a YA heroine (or anti-heroine!) as it is a very comfortable fit.

Plus, it shows you that they’re pretty progressive — after all, they’re picking up a book that was both crowdsourced and self-published. That sort of thing could be considered anathema to some, so it’s nice to see that the diversified approach that I like to take did the trick.

Thanks to ACP for publishing it. Thanks to my agent for helping make it happen.

And thanks to all of you, really, for loving the character enough and believing in the book.

(Art by the inimitable Amy Houser.)

“This e-book smells like a jockstrap and now my Kindle is sticky.”

So, I just read an article: “Amazon Poised To Sell Used E-Books.”

Let us, for a moment, set aside the super giant city-stomping questions this offers (like, “Will authors ever get paid again?” or “Can you really guarantee that the book will be deleted from the first user when transferred to the second?” or “Doesn’t this prove we’re all just renting content instead of buying it?” or “Isn’t this the next-door neighbor to the type of file-sharing that’s already supposed to be illegal?”) and instead, let’s focus on the ultimate philosophical question:

How the frosty fuck can non-corporeal content ever really be used?

Like, I buy a used CD? It’s the container that’s been used. The songs themselves — by which I mean the Platonic ideals of those songs — are in no way “used” and do not degrade with me listening to them. It’s only the physical compact disc that gets scratched up by your guinea pig or gets splashed with bongwater or ends up mangled by some early-generation Xbox player. Digital content remains the closest thing to that Platonic ideal of its original form.

In a book, pages get torn. In an e-book, unless we’re talking data degradation, the story never suffers. In fact, given the fact all this digital Internet stuff now lives in a magical glittery cloud of puckish 1s and 0s, we can already reclaim the perfect version of the content we procured. Hell, that’s why “e-book” is actually a completely wrong-ass name for what it is: a book is a physical device. The story is no longer truly contained, trapped not by a device or by a medium of transference but only by a file. So, again I ask, huh? How the hell do you “use” content that’s not-contained and unconstrained? (And this is why unauthorized file-sharing is so easy.)

Is this blog post “used” after the first person reads it?

Will it start to smell like Cheetos and beer?

Will it get fingerprints on it?

Will someone start drawing little penises shooting jizz bullets in the margins?

How the?! What the?! Wuzza? Wooza?

(For the record, I’m willing to admit that this may be something other than it sounds, as it’s not like this is some formally-announced thing. But my mind is a-boggled with the very notion of used digital content. The thing about the Internet is that it’s now, here, always on and forever new, and this feels like a kind of philosophical rebranding that is, at the best, befuddling, and at the worst, a scary prediction of how content gets treated.)

(And all this after this week’s piracy chatter.)

I met Laura at Chicon this past year, and at the time I met her I didn’t realize she had a book coming out — but once she started talking about it I was like, “Okay, you buried the lede on that one because uhh, holy crap, AWESOME.” I am now in possession of her novel and it’s a lovely creature whose covers I cannot wait to crack.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m Laura Lam, naturally. I grew up as the child of two hippies outside San Francisco and for some insane reason (well, my husband), I left behind the sunshine to move to cloudy North-east Scotland. I’m your pretty typical bookish girl who spends far too much time in front of a computer screen.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Girl stifled by society. Boy joins a circus. Their stories combine in an unanticipated way in a magical circus where everyone has secrets.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

This story emerged from a lot of my pet interests—the circus, Victorian society, a decaying empire, industrialization and colonization, and gender studies. It’s a mashup of genres, but somehow it all came together and worked, or at least I hope so.

The main character sparked to life in a phone conversation with my other half, Craig, when he was in Scotland and I was in California. But I was afraid to write about that character for about a year, until I realized that his was a story I needed to tell. I started writing the character as a 27-year-old, but I kept running into walls on that story, so I decided to write about Micah’s backstory joining the circus as a teenager. I absolutely loved the setting and Micah’s younger voice and everything clicked.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Every book is the culmination of experiences and interests. Though I have not experienced what Micah and Gene have, Pantomime explores topics that I am passionate about. The voice and tone and everything about it is a result of the life I’ve lived, the books I’ve read, the films I’ve watched, and the places I’ve visited. If you asked someone with zero interest in gender studies to write a book set in the circus, for instance, it’d be a very different book to Pantomime.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING PANTOMIME?

Writing characters that both are both similar and dissimilar to myself. All characters have aspects of the writer or someone the writer knows, though they may be exaggerated. In Gene especially, we react to things in similar ways, and some of Micah’s thoughts mirror my own, but at the end of the day they have gone through travails and experiences that I never will. Putting myself in their shoes was sometimes easy and sometimes very difficult. I also focus more on characters, at least at first, and I had some issues with plotting. As the first book of a series it was hard to know how much to reveal and how much to keep close to my chest for future books.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING PANTOMIME?

Most of what I know about writing. Pantomime is the first book I completed. I wrote it all chronologically, and then writing buddy and fantasy author Anne Lyle pointed out that it meant the pacing was way off, and the problems set up at the beginning didn’t match the problems at the end. In my edit I alternated between Summer and Spring viewpoints so that they were two intertwined plots, and that worked much better as they each had their own problem to solve.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT PANTOMIME?

I love that it dares to be different. Gene and Micah are not your typical YA protagonists in many ways, and I love them both. I think they’re strong yet flawed and are trying to make sense of the world they’re in and who they want to be.

I also really love the world. There’s so much for me as a writer to explore, and that I hope a reader will enjoy exploring. The first book focuses on the small corner of the circus, a little microcosm that prides itself on staying apart from society. Everyone there is a freak, and so being freakish is normal. That world around the circus blossomed as I wrote this book and the 75% of the other book I wrote with the elder Micah Grey (which I’ll revisit one day), and so I look forward to exploring it more.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Probably have a better game plan going in. I wrote Pantomime in very slow dribs and drabs and the first draft took 15 months, though I was working on different projects. I also wrote without a cohesive outline.

That meant that during the revision request from Strange Chemistry I received I had to basically gut it, rearrange it, rewrite half of what I had and add 25,000 words. Now I outline and edit as I go (the vomit draft method doesn’t work for me), and I write faster and hopefully stronger as well.

I also would have researched the publishing process more than I did so I didn’t accidentally make an ass of myself, which happened once or twice. I shake my head at my past self.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Technically it’s two, but I’ll cheat a little as one is so short:

“The aerialist stepped onto the tightrope. The rope bent slightly under her weight and I held my breath, frightened she would fall.

But her feet were steady as she made her slow, steady crossing in midair. She looked so dainty and delicate as she walked, pointing her toes when she lifted a foot, holding the parasol aloft, as though she could bend her legs, propel herself upwards, and fly away. The light filtered through the lace, shadows dappling her skin. When she finally made it across, I let out the breath I had been holding and clapped as loudly as I could.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I’m currently hard at work on the sequel. Agent edits have dropped so I’m taking my rough-around-the-edges draft and making it shine. Pantomime 2 (title to be determined) takes a different focus to its predecessor, while it still focuses on the theatrics and magic that Pantomime contains.

Pantomime: Amazon / Amazon UK / B&N / Indiebound

Laura Lam

@lr_lam

Yesterday I wrote a thing about my thoughts on book piracy (or whatever you want to call it, including “thievery” or “unauthorized file-sharing” or “warez” or “Dave”), and there I suggested that we make today — February 6th — International Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day, where authors and writers and creatives of all types hop online to share their thoughts about piracy. This, then, is my entry serving that goal. If you join in, let us know.

It’s not about the money.

I mean, maybe it is. In the long run. About the money.

I need money, being a human being who lives in a capitalist society and all. I have bills to pay. A roof to keep over my family’s head. I have to keep my Internet turned on. I have to buy whiskey. I need to afford all those unusual sexual devices in the shapes of various mythological figures (though I find “Hephaestus’ Forge” more than a little uncomfortable).

So, to clarify, it’s not just about the money.

I have this notion. I believe that art has value. I believe that this value is not purely or even necessarily monetary — art and stories make the world go around. They change the creators and they change the audience. They make us think and feel. They teach us things. They challenge us. And, at the base level of it all, they can entertain us when we’ve just plain had a dogshit day.

The value of art being separate from money does not unfortunately remove the artist from this world of ours, a world that is at times comfortably and other times crassly capitalist. Because the artist lives in this world and not some other perfect world (WHERE WE ALL HAVE PET UNICORNS WHOSE HORNS ALSO SPRAY DELICIOUS WHISKEY INTO OUR MOUTHS wow that got phallic really fast), we must then suggest that for the artist to create the art that moves us and challenges us and entertains us, the artist must be given a means by which to survive.

“Starving artist” is a cliche that, like most cliches, comes from a real place.

It’s hard to make money with art. Not impossible. And maybe “hard” isn’t even the word.

But it is, at times, a challenge.

Which is where this whole issue of “unauthorized file-sharing” comes in. Meaning, you or someone else downloads my book without paying for it. I don’t consider this stealing. And without effective data on the subject, I don’t even know if it’s really hurting me at all.

Hell, maybe it’s even helping. (More on that in a moment.)

This isn’t about that.

This is about what people see as the relative value of art. File-sharing expresses the value of that art at baseline of almost zero. It takes ridiculously little effort to click a button and tickle the Internet and make it poop out my book onto your respective e-reader. I’d be impressed if you had to… I dunno, throw a trash can through a window and grab my book off the shelf before the ED-209 police-bot tromps over and fires a photon torpedo up your slurry-chute — at least then I know you really wanted that goddamn book. But file-sharing is so… simple, so effortless, even careless it feels like it dismisses the entire thing we do.

So, let me be clear about it: it’s hurt feelings I’m talking about. I get a twinge in my gut when you pirate my stuff. A tiny little prison shiv of sadness.

And maybe you don’t give a lemur’s left nut about that. I don’t see why you would. Certainly if you’ve nabbed my book by some illicit Internet means you probably have your reasons for doing so. Some of those reasons might not even be terrible. Many of my books are DRM free and are not exactly expensive, but just the same, maybe you’ve got your knickers in a twist about blah blah blah whatever. Maybe you want to stick it to me. Or to my publishers. Or to Amazon. And this is your way of voting with your not-dollar, a splinter in the eye of commercial publishing. Maybe you don’t have access and I don’t realize it — certainly the International Internet Laws are both byzantine and bizarre. I don’t know if you can buy my book in Papua New Guinea.

If you pirate my work, I don’t hate you. I don’t think you’re scum. I mean, unless you’re taking my work and slapping your name on it. Or you’re somehow making money off the pirating of my work. Then you officially get squished sloppily into the “scumfuck” category, thanksmuch.

Here’s all that I’m asking:

I’m asking you to try to support art. Which means, when you can pay for it, please do pay for it. The more content drifts toward free and open access, the  harder it will be for the content-creators to continue creating content, at least until some major paradigm shift in crowdfunding or patronage models offers up a revised revenue stream that won’t cause me to starve and die.

If you find that some component of the books doesn’t work for you — some kind of DRM or issues of access, I might suggest pirating the book but then paying for a physical copy. And then taking that copy and either using it to shore up a crooked table or, even better, donating it or passing it along to a friend. Don’t donate directly to me; my publisher helped make my books exist. Publishers catch a lot of shit for a lot of shit. Some of it is deserved. But the truth is, my books — and most of the books you’ve loved in your life — are due to the publishers getting to do what they do. They’re an easy target but they deserve some back-scratchings once in a while.

If you find the pricing practices of an author or publisher problematic, you should at least let that author or publisher know. Voting with your dollar (or with your unauthorized file-sharing) only has value when the author/publisher knows why.

At the very least, if you nab a copy of my book from some shady smut-shellacked Spam-Bot peddling them in some dimly-lit corner of the Cyber-Webs and you happen to like it, I’d love for you to tell other people about it. And maybe, one day, consider buying some other book of mine.

That’s what this guy did. He grabbed Blackbirds without paying for it.

And then bought all my other books.

Which is, you might say, a way to ethically share files, unauthorized or no.

Mostly, I just want you to think about the artists and authors and even the people in publishing once in a while. We like what we do and we want to continue to have the means to do it. If that means you buy the book through normal means, great. If that means you ethically support the ecosystem through other, less authorized means, hey, I can’t stop you.

Just be aware of what’s happening. Be aware that you’re not the only person involved in this exchange. This story didn’t fall from the heavens, dropped out of some heavenly sphincter. It took work. And love. And pain. And time. Think beyond the button-click it takes to snatch it from the etheric 1s and 0s. Take time to realize that art and stories have value.

To you, to me, to that guy over there.

Art is rad.

Stories are awesome.

Try to pay for them once in awhile.

Especially if they’re mine, ’cause I’m saving up for that fucking whiskey-jizzing unicorn.