Oh. Oh thank god. He finally screwed up.

Right, sorry. You don’t know what’s going on. My name is Brian White. I’ve been locked in Chuck’s cellar for the past two years. Usually he only lets me use an old eMachines laptop, but he broke it over Stephen Blackmoore’s head in an author cage match last night. And now Chuck wants his collection of “artsy” nude selfies organized so he chained me up in front of his iMac and then went out to buy more coffee for me to grind.

(What? Did you think he actually spends all that time making coffee with his Chemex? No. That’s all me. The only thing Chuck pours is a torrent of abuse, kicks, and leftover hobo parts down the cellar stairs.)

But I don’t have time to waste on my litany of pain. Chuck didn’t log out of Terribleminds before he left. This is my only chance. I need your help.

Not escaping. I have given up hope of that. But my one bright spot, the thing that keeps me going when Chuck makes me dance for the amusement of the secret cabal of Amazon executives, is my magazine, Fireside.

We’ve been cranking Fireside out for two years now. We’re a fiction magazine, and we have two goals: publishing great storytelling regardless of genre, and fair pay for writers. We became a monthly subscription magazine in our second year, and now we are trying to get Year 3 of Fireside funded on Kickstarter.

Year 2 has been great. We’ve been running a serial that Chuck, uh … “suggested” I publish. We’ve had tons of wonderful flash fiction and short stories. And amazing art by Hugo-winner Galen Dara. And we want to keep it going.

If we fund Year 3, we’re going to try out making the website free. We’re going to do more short stories and flash fiction, and we’ll have a serial by Lilith Saintcrow. I’ve gotten my hands on a Miriam Black short story that Chuck left on his desktop that we’ll publish, along with stories by Blackmoore, Kima Jones, Daniel Jose Older, Andrea Phillips, and Sofia Samatar. And we’ll also be accepting submissions of both short stories and flash ficition, on a quarterly basis starting in June.

We’re making the website free, but as I said, we pay our writers fairly (12.5 cents a word), so we need your help. Please check out the Kickstarter. (Linky linky.) You’ll be making a lot of writers happy, and you’ll be helping me survive the next time Chuck gets out the wiffle ball bat.

Oh god. I have to go. B-dub’s toy cocktail shaker is glowing blue. Chuck is almost back.

Thank you.

EDIT:

Chuck here.

You can all relax — Brian’s in the cellar and I’ve turned off all Internet access for the time being. I’ve switched out his “in-bucket” and his “out-bucket” as punishment.

I’ve been keeping him in the cellar for the three years that Fireside has been running, actually. It’s not a sex thing, really — mostly he got accidentally locked down there when I asked him to head downstairs and get some beer from the cellar fridge, but then he tripped and knocked himself out and was threatening, “Oh, I’m going to sue you for leaving that dead hobo down here for me to trip over,” and I was like, “Oh, no you’re not,” and then I chained him to the water heater and made him listen to old Ace of Base albums — which is a very good album, I’ll have you know. But then it got kind of boring, so I was like, “Why don’t you start a magazine where you pay the authors well above the standard professional rate and also, why doesn’t each iteration of the magazine feature me in some very important way,” and then I hit him a bunch with the bat and then had him dust-wrestle the UPS guy I had down there at the time (don’t worry, that guy’s been in Bri-Bri’s food bucket for a good while now). Brian agreed to start Fireside.

And here we are, Year Three.

Each time it’s been successful on Kickstarter, but always at the last minute — and this year, I’d love to see it go a little further, a little faster. Just so we can give Brian something nice.

Anyway. Go. Check it out. I will be writing a new Miriam Black short story for it, so, there’s that. (And Fireside Year Two has me writing a serialized sci-fi story about a box that takes you ten minutes back in time — “The Forever Endeavor.” Get it? Get it, huh? No?)

So, check out the Kickstarter.

Unless you’d like to join Brian in the cellar?

I know, I said I wouldn’t talk publishing. BUT IT’S MY BLOG AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT HA HA HA HA *noisily eats a Hot Pocket, turns the TV on real loud, opens the chimpazee cage, hands the chimpanzee a beer and a power drill*

Ahem.

Let’s see, here.

Amazon has reduced the royalty rate on ACX audio for self-published authors.

So, let’s just clear this up:

Amazon is not your friend, author person.

Amazon is a giant corporation. It serves itself. You might think, It serves its customers, which is only true in that to serve itself it generally has to serve its customers. And this is entirely fine and normal. To reiterate: Amazon is not your friend. Its job is not to be your friend. Amazon is a great disruptor. Amazon is a powerful business. Amazon has done wonderful things for the World Of Books. Hell, I love Amazon Prime. I love that I can order chimpanzee chow, 9mm ammo, and drill bits at 3AM in the morning and have them in two days (though, hey, Amazon — your Prime shipping times are slipping, just between you and me). Amazon is also the publisher of some of my young adult books through its imprint, Skyscape. My experience there has been wonderful. Great editors, great attention, strong promotion, and they give me input and allow me to have control over the work and input over things like the cover. Amazon does a lot of cool things.

Amazon is still not my friend. Nor is it yours.

Amazon is actually a many-headed creature. Some of those heads do awesome things. Some of those heads might run Draconian warehouses that feel a little like working in the belly of some kind of giant-sized prison robot.

None of these Amazon heads are your friends.

The attachment the self-publishing community has long held to Amazon is understandable — Amazon somewhat single-handedly delivered value and opportunity to that community. That community bought all the way in, and one could argue that the robust creative and intellectual investment has created a kind of momentum that has led to more self-publishers finding that space and joining it (sometimes exclusively) and has led to more people buying Kindles.

But for a while now, some folks (including myself) have been saying all along, “Amazon might change your royalties” (which are of course not really royalties at all, but that’s a semantic issue). And those warnings were often thought of as doomsaying. When I caution, “don’t put your eggs in one basket,” you might reasonably respond with, “Hey, if Amazon starts acting up and casting shenanigans about like an alcoholic chimpanzee with power-tools, I can just go somewhere else.”

And that’s true. Totally true.

But here’s the problem. Amazon isn’t the chimpanzee. It’s the 8-million-pound gorilla. And it didn’t get that big on its own. It got that way by people investing so completely in that ecosystem.

That’s true for folks who do all their shopping there.

It’s true for folks who buy all their e-books there.

It’s true for folks who publish all their e-books there.

So. Let’s say Amazon decides to limit advantages to self-publishers.

Sure, you can jump to B&N or Kobo or iBooks.

But we all know that Nook is shitting the bed. For now, at least.

And getting on iBooks is a lot harder than getting on Amazon.

I have heard of late a lot of people finding success at Kobo, which is nice.

But anybody who has a Kindle cannot use those platforms. And a whole lotta people have Kindles.

And we helped make that happen.

It is often the mode to chastise what The Big Five Publishers do, and understandably — they are sometimes very good for authors and sometimes not so good for authors. And the reason they can be sometimes not so good for authors is because they do not have a great deal of competition.

That should sound familiar.

Because that’s Amazon.

Amazon has very little competition in the e-reader space.

And what competition it has is dwindling.

We’ve said: “Big publishers are bad because they do not care about their authors but Amazon is good because it does. And so here, Amazon will surely handle all our eggs much better than those naughty publishers — with great love and care. So we should give all of our eggs to them.” And then we gave our eggs to them and watched as other egg-carriers started to wander around, confused, starving where they were standing (because remember, they have no eggs) and then now Amazon’s starting to teeter and totter and drop some of our goddamn eggs. And we’re like, “Yo, that’s not cool,” and Amazon’s like, shrug, “Whatevs, take your eggs elsewhere, it’s no skin of my GNASHING ROBOT GORILLA TEETH,” and then you realize — uh-oh. Nobody else is really around to carry those eggs anymore. Our eggs don’t go anywhere else.

See, when you concentrate a great deal of power in the hands of a single company, that company will maximize its profits and start taking more of its share.

It does this because, say it with me:

Amazon is not your friend.

Think about how you seduce readers with a lower price point.

Then, when they’re invested: you increase the price on that book or its sequels.

Smart business. The “drug dealer” trick — first taste is cheap or free.

And that’s what Amazon is doing here.

A good deal now. You get invested. Then a not-as-good deal later.

Maybe not a terrible deal. Maybe still better than what you’d get elsewhere.

But maybe not.

You don’t know because:

*screams it from the rooftops*

Amazon is not your friend.

The things you think Big Publishing does to hurt authors? Amazon will do it, too, soon as it can.

Because that tends to be how big businesses work.

Small businesses? Not so much. Because it’s harder to be a dick when you’re four guys in a room. It’s a lot easier when you’re a faceless Borg Cube with thousands of employees.

The bigger you are, the less human you become.

The takeaway?

Amazon has not yet decreased your take from self-published works.

They have done some things that suggest they might, however. Decreasing ACX payments, for one. Increasing Prime, for two (and increasing the threshhold for free shipping). Talking very publicly about increasing their profit margins, for three. (It’s important to note here that Amazon, despite being big as it is, has not been making much actual profit over the years, which is a trend that ostensibly will need to change.) Given that there may be a backlash against the Prime increase, Amazon may look to find other ways to secure greater profits. I assure you, they’d be more comfortable dinging self-publishers than the entirety of the Prime subscription base.

Further, indicators exist outside the purely economic. We can all pretend that Amazon isn’t a gatekeeper, but like I said before, Amazon doesn’t want to be eBay. They want to be Netflix, not YouTube. It lets most folks through the gate, but when it feels the need, it’ll remove Monster Erotica or Baboon Fart Story from its ranks without the courtesy of a complimentary reach-around. That fist may tighten. Either in terms of restricting content or gouging author-publishers (through royalty reduction, most likely, though possibly also through increased fees).

They’ll do this because:

Amazon no es tu amigo.

So. What do you do?

You diversify.

Spread those eggs around, man. Give some to B&N. To Kobo. To iBooks. Sell your works directly! (If you’re so keen to remove all barriers between you and a reader, there’s your way forward, by the way.) But it’s also worth considering publishing your work with a publisher, too — big, small, medium-sized, short story, novella, whatever. Point being, to protect your career, cleave toward a diversification of efforts. You have many eggs — so find for them many baskets. That way, to play out this metaphor to its ludicrous (and not to mention obvious) conclusion: if one basket falls on the sidewalk and breaks, you still have other, unbroken eggs.

Amazon isn’t your friend. It also isn’t your enemy. Big publishers aren’t, either. I love Amazon for what it’s done for books. I love big publishers for what they’ve done, too. But remember: these are companies. Corporations. Business entities. They’re like bacteria, or rabbits, or grass — they’ll grow wherever they can and if they suffer no competition they’ll invade and take over an area. And then it gets a lot, lot, lot harder to dig out an entrenched species. If you’re really an independent author — then be truly independent. Don’t be dependent on a single company for your livelihood. Just as an ecosystem thrives on diversity, so should you, as an author and a publisher.

The more I consider that situation (Jonathan Ross hosts Hugos, then doesn’t host Hugos), the more I think it’s starting to make sense how it moved so quickly. The narrative after has been one citing the “outrage police” and referring to the “lynch mob” and how they “cyber-bullied him” (which is a bit melodramatic to my mind, but so it goes) — but I think this narrative is far too simplistic and altogether a bit dismissive.

It was actually a perfect recipe for disaster. Here, check it:

a) Loncon would seem to go over its own committee’s heads to secure Jonathan Ross as a host.

b) Committee member Farah Mendlesohn resigns somewhat publicly over this. (Her resignation seems to now be private, though I think you can catch a bit of it here.)

c) Loncon decides to announce this over Twitter, which is like telling your mother you’re getting engaged over a text message HEY MOM WE R GETTIN ENGAGED L8R. This is chum splashing chum in the water, man: a good way to get a bad reaction. A public blog announcement at least gets you the room to say, “Here’s this guy, he’s great, here’s a video clip, here are his quotes.” Twitter is a river: fast-moving, gnashing rocks, angry fish.

d) Americans in general do not know who the fuck Jonathan Ross is. Seriously. No farking flarging fjording idea. This is a critical point and speaks to a divide between British fans (who know him and like him) and Americans (who only know him via a quick Google search).

e) That Google search yields controversy, because, HEY, THIS IS THE INTERNET, and we feed off controversy the way termites feed off of wood. Some of those links noting his controversies (which seems to be sexist and other -ists) are apparently born of various UK tabloids, but we aren’t particularly up to speed on which of your rags are tabloids and which are not — and even in this country, we still tend to spread around bullshit stories if we like the way they sound (“OH MY GOD GMO PIGS ARE LOOSE IN FUKUSHIMA AND THEY’RE RADIOACTIVE AND THESE RADIOACTIVE MUTANT MONSANTO HOGS ARE EATING PEOPLE, I read it on natural-GMO-diet-news-dot-com, which is also where I learned that if I shellac my body with okra snot, I will lose 50 lbs in one month guaranteed”). The Internet is the best at demonstrating our worst, and what it put on display for Ross was not his best — again, this is something a more measured and reasonable press release from Loncon might have undercut.

f) Women and minorities have a history of mistreatment within the SFF community. From “fake geek girls” to “SFWA bulletins” and on and on.

g) Women and minorities have a history of mistreatment and worse within SFF conventions. From the threat of creepiness to actual full-on creepiness to straight-up harassment.

h) The SFF community (or “community,” given that we aren’t all given membership cards and keys to the guesthouse) has weathered a series of controversies recently, which one might think makes them feel fatigued but what it does is create a kind of social PTSD as a result of everything. It puts everybody on kind of a hair trigger, looking for controversy not because we necessarily like those controversies but because they seem so goddamn common anymore.

i) When confronted on Twitter — somewhat aggressively, but again to call this insulting or cyberbullying is a bit of a stretch, YMMV, IMHO — Jonathan Ross’ response was to call women “stupid” and “small-minded.” This was not a guy who was like, “Hey, I understand, let me alleviate your concerns,” but rather a guy who reacted and bristled. Maybe he had the right — though one would hope a celebrity of his caliber would be less sensitive to it. But he did himself and the outraged no favors here — no effort to defuse the tension and, instead, made efforts to escalate them. Like winging a cup of gas on the campfire to try to put it out. (Few months ago, a SFF author who I won’t name  tweeted something that I didn’t see as an issue but some other folks there found problematic — and he handled the situation really quite marvelously, with humility and apology and communication rather than bluster and backtracking and anger. Even if he didn’t agree with the reaction, he defused tensions elegantly. Ross made no such efforts and seemed keen to take his ball and just go home.)

The point here isn’t that Ross wouldn’t have been a good fit — he was a fan, he seems like he might actually be a feminist, and a lot of UK folks seem quite keen on him — but instead the hope here is to try to suss out exactly why the shitstorm happened in the first place and also to try to conjure a little bit of empathy for everybody in this conversation. Because in the days that have followed I have seen real cyberbullying happen against the authors who spoke up about this on both sides of this debate. I think it’s better to have the discussion, however, then to resort to the shut-it-down door-closing phrases like “outrage police” and “lynch mobs.” That’s a good way to make somebody feel diminished and dismissed, and will only give oxygen to the fire.

It’s very easy to suggest that only the loudest, noisiest shit-stirrers were angry about this. But I saw a lot of authors and editors raise alarm over this — often in a very measured, non-alarmy way. This wasn’t just some torches-and-pitchforks mob — though certainly some acted that way, and that ugliness multiplied quickly.

This was something of a perfectly stupid storm in terms of how it escalated, is all I’m saying.

So, once more: cleave to empathy rather than insult.

Have the discussion instead of shutting the discussion down.

Otherwise, the genre and its authors and its fans are going to be that snake eating the crocodile: monsters just eating one another in the muck and the slurry.

Comments are open. Play nice, or I’ll shut the doors and lock you inside.

THEN I WILL RELEASE THE FERRETS.

I think it’s good to evaluate yourself as a writer sometimes, just to see who you are and how you’re doing — where do you stand and where are you headed? If you’re planning on doing this thing really-for-realsies, sometimes a look at your paths and processes is worth doing.

So, a handful of quick questions. A survey, but informal — no data collection, here.

Answer in comments, if you’re so inclined. If you want to also post at your blog to generate discussion there, hey, go for it. (But please still try to leave your answers here, as well.)

a) What’s your greatest strength / skill in terms of writing/storytelling?

b) What’s your greatest weakness in writing/storytelling? What gives you the most trouble?

c) How many books or other projects have you actually finished? What did you do with them?

d) Best writing advice you’ve ever been given? (i.e. really helped you)

e) Worst writing advice you’ve ever been given? (i.e. didn’t help at all, may have hurt)

f) One piece of advice you’d give other writers?

Was about to unleash a crackling tweetstorm on the Twitters — but as I started to prep the tweets it started to look like a Category 5. Too many tweets for your feeds to suffer. They’d buckle under the weight! SHE JUST CANNA HANDLE IT CAP’N.

Anyway.

Something-something Jonathan Ross, aka “Rossy,” aka, I don’t know who that is.

I woke up and people were all mad about him hosting the Hugos? HE’S SEXIST, they said.

And then I went to brunch and got out of brunch and he was no longer hosting the Hugos and now people were mad he wasn’t hosting the Hugos — HE’S NOT SEXIST, they cried, HE’S UTTERLY MILQUETOAST, and then people on both sides of the argument stopped being mad at Jonathan Ross and started being mad at each other, and I saw some particularly nasty chatter (and, mostly, backchannel chatter) on them there social medias that I just felt like backing away.

Outrage moves fast on the Internets. It’s like an electrical fire in a wig factory.

Here’s the thing: just be nice to each other. Even when you don’t agree. Because outrage against outrage only creates more of it, like Mogwai chucked in a hot tub. And then it gets ugly, as ugly feeds on ugly (and now our multiplying Mogwai are eating chicken wings and delivery pizza as they frolic and go mad in the frothing jacuzzi). And people being mean just doesn’t get anything done.

Assume that people who are outraged are sincere and earnest. You don’t have to think they’re right, mind you — nor do you need to appease and placate just because it’s outrage. But assume it’s real. Assume it comes from a place of hurt and not that it’s manufactured just for drama’s sake. Sure, sometimes it is. But you don’t know that and it’s very hard to tell unless you really know the heart of a person — how do you know that they’re just stirring shit because they like the smell and not because they’re actually upset? You don’t. Everyone should approach each other like they’re coming at common ground from different ends, not that they’re trying to burn the crops and salt the earth.

Really, be nice. Even when you don’t agree. Outrage is undercut and tempered by kindness — and kindness is also how compromise is found, how middles are met, how people come to understand each other’s POV. Ask questions even if they won’t ask the same of you. To be clear, I know I could learn this lesson sometimes.

Now, let’s all hug.

I mean, not inappropriately or anything. I’ll hug my monitor and you hug your — OH GOD THE COMPUTER IS FALLING OVER I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTA

W*&(%^TYfghghj /.,./

NO CARRIER

Last week’s challenge: Random Song Challenge

First up: an administrative detail. For those who took part in the Voicemails From The Future challenge — Reggie Lutz, you won a chronofact from the proceedings! Bounce me a message to terribleminds at gmail dot com. Yay!

(Er, edit: I don’t need everyone to write me an email. Just Reggie, thanks!)

Now: onto the challenge.

This week — not a flash fiction challenge so much so much as an experimental writing exercise. I want to do these from time to time just to keep things fresh around here.

So, here’s the drill —

I want you to take one thing and describe it ten different ways.

That thing can be… anything. An object. A person. A sensation. A place. An experience.

But I want you to focus on it and describe it multiple ways. Ten, as noted.

Each no more than a sentence of description.

(Feel free to choose a real world thing. Say, a lamp in your corner, or the flu you had last week.)

Differ your approaches in how you describe this thing.

Try pinballing from abstraction to factual — from metaphorical to forthright.

The goal here is just to flex our descriptive muscles a bit.

An example? After jogging the other day, I had a peculiar feeling in my face and I — as I am wont to do — went through the various ways I might describe this feeling. It was a hot pulsing. Like my heart was in my head. Like I was a goldfish inside an aquarium and some kid was tapping on the glass. Like both the basketball dribbling and the court on which it bounced. This is just a thing I do: I see a person or experience a sensation and I ask: how would I describe that?

Try it out. Pick a thing. Ten different descriptions.

Feel free to do this directly in the comments or at your blog (post a link).

Got till March 7th, noon EST to jump on in.

Go.