Another one

Well, I think the Dragon software is proving itself, it seems to be a real help in getting the stories to flow. With "Message Found Written on an End Roll of Newsprint" I've written four short stories so far this month - more than I wrote in all of 2013, with a cumulative word count of 9,138 words between those four stories.

Cannabalerinas

Here's another case where I made up a story to fit a clever title, or in this case, a neologism - "cannabalerinas". Wrote 2,000 words of the first very rough draft. The actual story title is "Message Found Written on an End Roll of Newsprint".

Pace picks up

I spent time Sunday doing minor rewrites to two stories as a result of feedback from editors who had returned them. I then sent those back out as well as two other stories that had come back last week.

As a result of a short burst of inspiration prodded by felicitous phrase that had appeared in a Facebook post, I wrote a new story, “The Grove of Curiosities”, over Sunday night and Monday morning and submitted it Monday morning. So that’s five stories that were sent out in two days.

"The Grove of Curiosities" took 14 hours from start to submission. That may be a record for me.

Sympathy for the She Devil

I just learned that a fairly proficient author named Vera Nazarian has started one of those crowdfunding campaigns for a purpose that is drawn some controversy. 

She was the sole proprietor of a small press called Norilana, which printed some pretty good books and some very good authors — but a few years ago she went through a period of incredibly bad health and stopped paying royalties.  She went through bankruptcy couple of years ago.

Her funding drive is to pay royalties she still owes to authors. By her own accounting she owes over $20,000. This is drawn a lot of flak, because people feel since she spent the money herself somewhere along the line she should pay the money back herself.

As someone who went through a disagreeable business failure a number of years ago – a small newspaper rather than of a small press – I understand how agonizing the whole process is. Sole proprietorships are dangerous creatures; they are often the best way for a small business to start, but when they implode there is usually no place to go for funding.

You end up robbing Peter to pay Paul, co-mingling funds and hoping that eventually you’ll get caught up. When you run out of time, your bookkeeping can look like a pot of spaghetti someone dropped on the kitchen floor.

My newspaper ran into difficulties because of a confluence of politics, demographics, and some health issues on my part. Apparently in the case of Vera, it was all health and very severe. A wise man once said “Sometimes you can die of bad luck” and from what I can tell, Vera was fighting for her life.

I think like any average genre writer, the odds of her coming up $20,000 out-of-pocket would be difficult under any circumstances. I think it’s interesting that she is still trying to do something about this; the average schmuck would just blow it off and go on.

The people the lambasting her, I think, need to remember those sayings about walking a mile in someone’s shoes, or throwing the first stone. That’s not to say what she did was wasn’t wrong, but we all make mistakes in life. We don’t have debtors prisons in the United States – yet – and despite what some people think, you can’t put someone to death for owing you money.

My experience in the speculative fiction publishing field is that a lot of people do it for love and/or fun. They consider themselves fortunate if they simply don’t go in the hole. As in the case of a marriage or a relationship, it’s difficult to admit things have not worked out. We all know how often people stay in marriages and relationships past the time when they should have broken up; this also happens to in businesses that are labors of love.

In marriages the financial fallout is that you owe alimony. In a business failure, you owe creditors. When my newspaper was going under, someone came to my office and smashed it up, and knocked me around a bit. They got away with it, because of collusion between law enforcement and the courts. Well as Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “and so it goes.”

So I find it hard to work up ahead of steam of righteous indignation over the Vera Nazarian’s plight. I may very well toss in a few dollars myself. Some people have suggested looking up the authors she still owes money to and paying them directly. Which is not a bad idea. But at the very least, I think people should at least try to imagine what circumstances led to her financial difficulties as well as her decision to go public in a project that has subjected her to public humiliation.

We are all human, and at any given time most of us are broke.

Con conflicts

One unusual development this year is that there are two cases where conventions I have attended in the past have moved to fall on the same weekend. As a result I've had to turn down two invitations to be a panelist..

Last year I attended Galaxy Fest in Colorado Springs and ConDFW in Dallas on two successive weekends in February. This year they were both held the weekend of February 21-23rd. I regret having to turn down Galaxt Fest, but I really felt I needed to participate in the Dallas convention.

I have the same problem in June when both Soonercon in Oklahoma City and Apollocon in Houston are being held on the same weekend. In this case I turned down Apollo con — despite it being a Texas convention – because Oklahoma City is actually closer to me than Houston and I have some closer ties to people in Oklahoma City. But I really really wish I could go to Apollocon also.

Unfriend

Well I had to do something Thursday that I hadn't done before really and it was unfriend someone on Facebook for a nonpolitical reason. The past few times I've unfriended anyone it was because they posted personal political opinions that I found so obnoxious that I did want to read their posts. Obviously these weren't close friends or else I would've already known that personal opinions.

However one Facebook Friend kept doing something I found it inappropriate. I post updates on my Facebook wall of how my writing is going -I think some people find it interesting -but every time I posted some update of my writing this guy would one up me to make some comment about his writing and how much he was writing. He was essentially using my Facebook postings for his self-promotion. I don't think it was malicious, from what I can tell he's just an Uber geek. I basically felt this was inappropriate and if he doesn't know what the problem with that is well that's his problem and I unfriended him.

Update: I think taking this action has helped. I posted on Facebook today about the completion of my latest story and I got 16 comments and 18 likes, which is more than usual. In the past it seemed this person's propensity to respond with some kind of self promotion after each comment stifled the thread. I mean, why post a comment when somebody's going to respond right back at you and their new own writing skills?
A few people have commented about their own writing output, but the not as methodically as this one person I removed from my friends list.

Send off

I finished editing "The Girl Who Couldn't Fly" and sent it off for its first submission today. The first rough draft was 4,100 pages, but by the time it was finished it was just over 3,400 words - a good sign, in my opinion. The better edited a story is, the tighter it gets and the more it shrinks. This is counter-intuitive for most people, and also the opposite of journalism where - since you always write tight to begin with - the more you work on a story the longer it gets.

"Girl" seemed to tighten somewhat more than average, but I believe that is because it was dictated using the Dragon software. That seems normal, storytelling is more chatty that writing.