Somebody Notify Connie Willis

The protagonist of Connie Willis's novel Remake has a depressing sort of job: he uses computers to remove incidents of alcohol and tobacco consumption from classic Hollywood movies, in order to make them socially acceptable for broadcast on television. At the time the book was written (1995) this was a science-fictionally amusing idea.

This afternoon I was channel-surfing and came across a broadcast of Wonder Boys, the 2000 film of the Michael Chabon novel and a movie I liked even if nobody else did. The scene that was playing had a depressed Michael Douglas sitting on the ground with a lit cigarette.

And every time he drew the smoke up to his mouth, the screen blurred around it.

I don't like this movie, Mr. DeMille.

The Five Stages of Galley Proofing

[I received the first round of galleys of A Tangled Weave in mid-December. I suppose this means I have a new top priority in my January to-do list.]

Galley proofs from Five Rivers Publishing;
collage by Hib Novotny

DENIAL
I am never going to to see these things. O woe, the publisher has forgotten me! My book will never appear, and my career will be doomed.

ANGER
Why has the publisher sent these galleys to me now? I'm in no shape to get anything done with them. I have new projects on the go and my career is burgeoning. Whatever that is.

BARGAINING
Look, I promise I'll get to these right away, if you'll just agree that my book is a thing of wonder and worthy of a recommendation on io9 or tor.com.

DEPRESSION My ghod, what was I thinking when I wrote this? The text doesn't look exactly wrong, in the sense that these are properly spelled words organized in some recognizably grammatical fashion. But—but—what is this supposed to mean? Horror! DOOOOOOM!

ACCEPTANCE I suppose there's no point in worrying about this anymore. My career is doomed; I'll just have to live with this. Oh, look! Cute animals on the internet!

Introducing the Herridge Lake Public Library

Image of Nick and Nora in
the logo (see note) courtesy
 of Chris Smith

Friday (4 January 2019) I wrote that I was tired of the process of selling fiction* and that I had decided to just give away my writing. This post explains what, precisely, this decision entails. Please feel free to pass on this information to anyone who might be interested.

There is form for this giveaway decision: Cory Doctorow has from the beginning of his career made it a policy to provide free downloads of his novels for all who want them. If it's good enough for Cory...

So with a new year just under way, I am introducing a new e-book imprint, managed by yours truly for the sole purpose of giving away free e-books of my writing, and free fiction posts for those as have browsers but no e-readers. This is the birth announcement of the Herridge Lake Public Library†.

How This Is Going To Work

I currently have a half-dozen novels (not counting the two published by or contracted to Five Rivers) edited and ready for publication, or very nearly so, and two more in the early stages of drafting. They fall into a range of sub-genres—alternate history, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, dark fantasy—and so I persuade myself there's enough material available that would interest a range of readers.

Beginning the second week of January 2019, I will begin serializing these novels, one book at a time, in this blog. The plan is to serialize a complete novel every six months or so. Once the serialization is complete, I will compile the novel into an e-book and make it available for free download. No hidden fees, no complicated documentation, just a basic Creative Commons license. At some point in the near future I will probably put together a collection of my short fiction as well.

I hope everyone in Quipu-land will enjoy reading this stuff as much as I enjoyed writing it.

*Beyond, of course, the basic transaction involved in arranging and signing a contract, with either an agent or an editor/publisher. I'm disillusioned (a little) but I'm not demented.

†Herridge Lake is a glacial (I assume) lake in the Temagami forest of Ontario. From time to time I do some writing up there; about half of my completed novels were in whole or in part written at Lake Herridge Lodge. The trees in the logo are Nick and Nora, a pair of pines visible from the lodge, and named by a group of us who are sometime visitors.

Free to Good Home

I like to write. I have always liked to write. Many a writer has complained to me about preferring having written to the pain of writing. But I have always enjoyed the process as much as the satisfaction derived from completing a project*.

Same old typewriter, same old public domain

What I don't like, I have recently realized, is selling. I came to this realization last summer, at When Words Collide 2018 in Calgary. I'd never been to this conference before, and so hadn't realized just how much of its programming time is devoted to the business end of fiction. I don't even know what Amazon keywords are, much less how to find the right ones. More importantly, I don't want to know.

I remember the moment of revelation quite clearly. I'd signed up for the autograph session (I've done these at Bouchercon and World Fantasy and even Worldcon, I believe) and arrived to discover that the room was full of people selling their (mostly self-published) books. Over the couple of hours I spent in that room I counted maybe a dozen people walking around with books for signing, looking for the relevant authors in the overheated maze. And I'm probably being generous in my count.

I don't want to do this, I thought. And then, a few days later while enjoying a FRED in Edmonton with alumni of ESFCAS, I had a secondary enlightenment: I don't have to do this. For a variety of reasons that aren't relevant here, I don't absolutely need any more money than I already have; I certainly don't need the minuscule amounts most self-published authors earn. Not if it comes at the expense of writing time. And charging money for your writing is a lot of work.

So I've decided to stop worrying so much about selling. My new work still goes out, of course: I'm not idiot enough to turn down the prospect of a decent contract. But now there's a time-limit involved: if a book doesn't have representation or a contract within six months of its being ready for publication, then I'm going to just give it away.

I realize I've buried the lede here. But I'm not finished, either. I'll be back with a more detailed explanation tomorrow or in the next few days.

*Most of the time. The writer who says she's never been frustrated with the process is lying.

The Perils of Research

I've just spent a productive (for some values of that word) afternoon at the Toronto Reference Library. I have been reading (and taking notes) from a book called Southern Pamphlets on Secession (edited by Jon L. Wakelyn), the contents of which mostly consist of justifications for slavery by politicians, intellectuals and religious leaders. I had never, before today, read in full Alexander Stephens's so-called "Cornerstone" speech. Nor had I even heard of a one-time Florida governor named Richard Kieth Call, who in a letter of February 1861 described the most feverish, bizarre, quasi-Malthusian fantasy of how twenty million black Americans would die of starvation or chaotic violence if slavery weren't allowed to spread throughout the entire world but instead were restricted, as Lincoln had proposed, to the current Southern states.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I really need a bath...

A Moment of Chuffage

Photo by Lorna Toolis

Lorna and I paid a visit, recently, to Calgary's magnificent new central library. We were most impressed, me from a purely aesthetic and end-user perspective, Lorna from a much more professional viewpoint.*

The entire building seems full of light and air, all white walls and shelves with blonde wood. The shelves themselves are not tall (essentially they top out at upper chest height on me) which has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that one never feels hemmed in. Even a claustrophobic like yours truly can feel comfortable among the shelves. I can easily see spending numerous happy hours working or just enjoying in this space, and am appropriately envious.

We walked through the entire building from topmost floor to entrance (or at least those bits open to the public), and when we found ourselves in the fiction books and noticed they had a separate section for SF and Fantasy, I went on a whim to the last shelf. And what do you think we found there?

I was more than a little chuffed, and had Lorna take a couple of photos—purely evidentiary, of course. (I believe this is the only time I'll ever appear alongside Jeff Vandermeer and Norman Spinrad.)

*My friend Wallace describes the place as "an architectural achievement without enough books in it." I'm confident the latter case will fix itself, given enough time.

Lost Cords

I've another guest post up on the Five Rivers blog, this one about the inspiration behind my upcoming A Tangled Weave. I haven't told the entire story in that post, though. Wanted to make myself look a bit more professional there, doncha know. The full truth is much less flattering.

French nobles, late 17th
century

I have always kept notebooks, but for some reason I have never really kept one in the fashion of Dwight Garner, to say nothing of this sort of book. I am coming to deeply regret this, if for no other reason than that I am finding myself increasingly unable to justify certain choices I've made in my writing.

That is to say, when I'm asked where the idea came from, I'm too often unable to be specific. Sometimes this failure is more awkward than others. The title of an alternate-history novel I'm (occasionally) working on, for example, comes from something I wrote when working on Dixie's Land (about which more anon). What I didn't write down was the source of the quote. And now I can't even remember which notebook I wrote in.

More French nobles

So when Lorina, my publisher, asked me for a short essay on the origins of A Tangled Weave, I was once again stumped. The moment of inspiration was pretty much as electrifying as I describe it in that guest post. The problem was, I couldn't remember what I'd been reading when inspiration struck. And because my approach to world-building for that novel was, shall we say, not as detailed as it has been for other novels, my notes contained nothing of use to me.

Normally I'd just go downstairs to the stacks and thumb through my books until I found the relevant source. But... four or five years ago we underwent a massive downsizing, in an ultimately successful attempt to reduce the size of our library in preparation for a large-scale renovation project. At the time I was sure I was finished with all of my books about seventeenth-century Europe. So I had nothing to research with.

French dandy (holy cow)

This left me with the fallback resource a lot of writers are reluctant to admit to: Google. I'm more than happy to admit to using Google and Wikipedia as preliminary research sources (will probably have more to say about this later, as well), but these work better for general topics. Searching for something like "prohibition Indian cotton France" brings up lots of results—more than ten million, in fact—but not the result I wanted. (Okay, to be accurate, the result I wanted wasn't in the first half-dozen pages of results, which was as far as I was prepared to trawl.)

French peasants, gendarme

To make a long story short, I eventually found a reference to the book that had inspired me, but I didn't find it by searching on anything fabric-related. I found it by searching for books on "everyday things," which my memory eventually told me was possibly part of the subtitle of the book that had proved so useful in giving me background to the world of Lise's wealthy aunt in A Poisoned Prayer.

Having found the reference and written my piece for the Five Rivers blog, I am now committed to being much more careful about noting not just book titles but even page numbers in my researches for new projects.

Let's see how long this resolution lasts.

Images are taken from The History of Costume by Braun & Schneider (in the public domain).

Happy 2019, Everybody