To Baltimore--- and Beyond!

I'm off to Balticon, and will check in from there if the Internet gods are willing.

Turns out I'm on programming after all--- a reading at noon on Sunday, followed by a signing at one.

(At least I managed to avoid the Williams Hour--- ten o'clock on Sunday morning, when the only audience I get are the drunk guys who haven't been to bed.)

Anyway, hope to see you all there.

Big Idea, Over There

If you're sick of me talking about Implied Spaces on this blog, you can go to John Scalzi's blog and read my essay about Implied Spaces over there.

Yes, Mr. Scalzi has very kindly allowed me to contribute to his Big Idea feature.

Now if only the book would show up in the stores. (Tapping foot, looking anxiously at watch.)

My Balticon Schedule

Where to find me at Balticon?

The hotel lobby, most likely. Or the bar.

Because I'm not on any of the programming. Apparently I joined too late.

On the other hand, this means greater opportunity for you to engage me in chat.

Feel free to do so. I won't bite--- or of I do, it won't be without fair warning.

A Brief but Definitive Incursion of Real Life

So I returned from my idyllic week in the mountains to this:

1. A refrigerator that has more or less given up the ghost.
2. The dryer, ditto.
3. A cat with a serious, serious, serious attack of diarrhea. (You do not want me to post a cute cat picture here, no you don't.)
4. An elderly man afflicted with Alzheimer's wandering lost in my front yard.

Dealt with thus:

1. A new refrigerator arrives on Wednesday.
2. The repairman will be called next week, after I get back from Balticon.
3. Trip to the vet.
4. Reminding the old gent where he lives, and steering him there.

On Wednesday I leave for Balticon and, umm, some other stuff, so all crises must be dealt with by Tuesday, on pain of, well, causing me a lot of pain.

Number One

Implied Spaces, despite not as yet having demonstrated physical existence, is now ranked Number One in Amazon's list for Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Which is sort of, umm, amazing.

I humbly thank you all for participating in this rather miraculous event.

A Week in the Mountains

Only the highlights, now.

Sunday dinner, by Walter:

Royal roast leg of lamb with saffron and raisin sauce (shahi raan).
Chicken smothered in aromatic herbs and almonds (badaami murgh)
Chickpeas in ginger sauce (safaid channi)
Spinach cooked clarified butter with ginger and spices (saag)
Hot curried watermelon
Saffron pilaf
Dessert: mangoes caramelized in butter, brown sugar, and brandy, with cream.

Monday:

"The Curandero," by Daniel Abraham.
"His Heart's Desire," by S.C. Butler

Dinner by Maureen:

Rustic roast pork loin with garlic and ginger
Crispy roasted potatoes
Roasted carrots, onions, and apples
Dessert: apple bread pudding with cream

Tuesday:

"The Naturalist" (screenplay), by Maureen McHugh

Dinner by Catherynne Valente

Linguini and shrimp in a goat cheese sauce with roasted poblano peppers and cilantro.
Sweet Greek salad of fresh tomatoes, onions, zucchini, cilantro, and fresh pineapple in balsamic dressing.
Baguettes with cilantro pesto
Dessert: mangoes and pumpkin seeds in dulce de leche

Wednesday:

"The River Bank," by Kristin Livdahl
Untitled Edge series story, by Melinda Snodgrass

Dinner by Walter

Poached shrimp in remoulade sauce
Chef Francoise's black roux gumbo with chicken and sausage
Dessert: bananas Foster flamed in brandy.

Thursday:

Untitled Jack Vance tribute story, by Walter
Untitled story by Ian Tregillis

Dinner by Melinda:

Coq au vin
White rice
Vegetarian pot pie
Dessert: hot fudge sundaes.

Friday:

Breakfast French toast with cinnamon and Triple Sec

"World Fantasy" by Alan DeNiro
"Game of Chance" by Carrie Vaughn

Dinner by Maureen:
Whipped brie on toasted baguettes drizzled with a balsamic reduction.
Hell's Kitchen Chili
Roasted green beans
Dessert: hot fudge sundaes redux

Saturday:

Excerpt from "The Spindle of Necessity" by Catherynne Valente

Dinner: at a restaurant.

Hot Curried Watermelon

Mens sana in corpore sano, as we say here at Rio Hondo. High-level literary criticism, bracing outdoor activities, drinking and relaxing, and eating food as good as the stories. Here's a typical day:

1. Critique stories by the likes of Daniel Abraham, Maureen McHugh, Ian Tregillis, or Alan DeNiro.

2. Forced march over the snow-covered 13,000-foot Williams Lake pass. (Tasers keep those sluggish SF geeks moving briskly)

3. Find bighorn sheep.

4. Kill it and butcher it on the spot.

5. Forced march back to the lodge, carrying the dripping meat on our shoulders.

6. Relax with beer in the hot tub while the Big Horn Chili simmers on the stove.

7. Eat vastly.

8. Repeat.

I may exaggerate a little for effect, but that's pretty much what we're up to.

The first night's dinner was an Indian extravaganza cooked by me. Daniel mentioned that Rio Hondo was the only time when he ever got to eat hot curried watermelon, and since I'm not secretive about my recipes--- especially the ones I cut out of the paper--- I thought I might share it with the adventurous-minded among you.

HOT CURRIED WATERMELON (Matira)

Ingredients:

1/4 of a large watermelon cut into 1-inch cubes (10 cups)

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 1/2 teaspoons ground red pepper (or to taste)

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon chopped or pureed garlic

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons oil

1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 tablespoon lime juice

1/2 tablespoon sugar

Drain off one cup of the watermelon juice, or puree enough watermelon to make a cup.

To watermelon juice, add paprika, red pepper, turmeric, coriander, garlic, and salt.

Heat the oil in a skiller over high heat and add cumin seeds. After 20 seconds, add the juice. Lower the heat and simmer until the juice is reduced by one-third.

Add lime juice and sugar. Add watermelon pieces and toss over low heat 3-4 minutes, until they are heated through. Do not overheat, as the watermelon will start to dissolve.

Serve immediately.

Will serve 4.

This is a very nice dish for summer, and will really surprise your guests.

To The Mountains

I'm off to Rio Hondo, in the mountains above Taos. Be back in a week--- refreshed, I hope.

Carry on. Please fix publishing while I'm away.

Publishing . . . Huh?

So this acquaintance of mine, who works for a Government Agency That Shall Not Be Named, was sent to a business seminar. Government departments are all about getting leaner and meaner these days, so Joe (as we shall call him) was sent off to learn about efficiency and just-in-time inventory and, in general, the Tao of Toyota.

As part of the course, Joe was asked to flow-chart a particular business. Since Joe knew a writer, he created a flow chart of the publishing business. He presented it to the class and to his instructors.

And the reaction was, basically, "Huh . . . ?"

The first thing asked was, "Who is the writer's client, exactly?"

Which is a hard one to answer. Because the author's ultimate client is the reading public, but the actual client, the one who forks over the money, is the editor.

"So who is the editor responsible to?"

Another hard one to answer. Because the editor is responsible to the publisher, or to the publisher's stand-in, in the forms of various committees to which the editor is expected to present her plans. But power is also held by the sales force--- I wish I had ten thousand dollars, or even ten, for every time I've heard an editor say, "I can't sell this proposal . . . the sales force won't understand it."

(Once--- exactly once--- I heard of an editor who told his sales chief, "Your job is to sell the fucking books that I tell you to fucking sell, and if you don't fucking sell them, you're out of a fucking job!" And that editor was John Jarrold, who is English, and maybe they do things differently over there.)

So Joe presented his flow-chart of publishing, with the editor, and the committees, and the sales force, and the art department.

"Who is the art department responsible to?"

Well, very often, they're responsible to no one. The art department is often a separate fiefdom within the publisher, and they put whatever art they like on a cover, or no art at all, and if the editor and writer don't like it, they can lump it.

And then there's the copy-editor--- who is freelance, essentially in a fiefdom all his own--- and even worse, the distributors.

"Who are the distributors responsible to?"

Well, no one. They buy whatever the hell books they want, based on whatever pitch the sales person gives them plus the computer figures for the writer's last set of sales, and if they don't sell the books, they can ship them back to the publisher for a full refund. Or even destroy them, and still get a full refund. They get all the privileges of being a middleman, and none of the risk. None. Zero.

One of the things they teach you at Toyota Camp is that for every step in the process in which something can go wrong--- for every committee, or editor, or art director, or copy-editor, or distributor--- that stands between the writer and the reading public, the odds of something going totally, hideously, horribly pear-shaped somewhere in the process does not increase arithmatically, but geometrically.

So if there are, say, seven potential roadblocks between the author and the reader, the effective number of roadblocks aren't seven, but forty-nine. Because friction begets more friction, basically.

(I have to say, as a personal note, that this theory explains the fate of my last seven novels rather well.)

The people at the seminar threw up their hands.

"We don't see how this business can possibly make money!"

And, of course, most books don't make money--- of if they do, they barely break even. For every huge mega-zillion best-seller, there are ten thousand books that are quietly flushed down the toilet of doom, along with the careers of their authors.

So why doesn't the industry concentrate on huge mega-zillion bestsellers? Well, they do--- that's why publishers' ads in, say, the New York Times literary supplement are mostly for authors who are so fabulously popular that they don't actually need the ads to sell their books. That's why publishers are shedding their mid-list authors (authors like me, only less lucky) left and right.

But even as mega-zillion bestsellers go, the publishers' record truly sucks. For every Da Vinci Code, which was turned into a megaseller through clever marketing, there are ten, or fifteen, or a hundred for which a lot of marketing dollars were spent only to produce disappointing sales. And for every Da Vinci Code, there's a Lovely Bones that became a huge seller through word of mouth--- or word of Oprah, or word of book clubs, or (most likely) word of Internet.

I once saw an article in which the books that publishers thought would become bestsellers (based on their marketing push) were compared with a list of actual bestsellers, and the lists were very, very different.

Bestselling authors mostly just sort of happen. It's sort of like throwing a bunch of books out of a tenth-storey window and hoping that one of them lands in a pot of gold.

So once you get a bestselling author--- however you get him--- you want to keep him, so you pay him more and more and hope his books earn it all back, eventually, and then some. Which is a strategy that sometimes works, or at any rate works often enough to keep publishers in business.

I won't go into how the folks at Toyota Camp assumed that writers all have personal assistants to do things like answer email, run manuscripts to the post office, arrange signings, keep the web page up to date, make coffee, keep the office tidy, furnish the author with healthful snacks, and so on. They were astonished that authors, unless they are very successful indeed, have to do this all themselves--- or not, as is often the case.

This explains author's burnout, by the way. Most authors in the SF genre have a writing life of about ten years, after which they do something more rational with their lives, like get a job teaching writing in a Midwest liberal arts school. (Oh yeah, there's a job with a future!)

So, to conclude, how do we apply the Tao of Toyota to publishing? Obviously, we need to reduce the number of roadblocks between the author and the reading public. An obvious way to do this is to make the books available electronically--- reader pays a few bucks for a download, author's bank account goes ching!, reader and author are happy. Except that this doesn't seem to actually work--- even Stephen King couldn't make a go out of directly selling his work on the Internet.

I don't have an answer, so I'm going to leave it to you.

I'm going to be out of town for a week. It's hard to say whether or not I'll be on the Internet or not during that time.

So during my absence I leave you with this challenge.

Publishing is broke. Come up with some ideas to fix it.

Thank you.

Revised Pub Date

So problems with the printer are presumably resolved, and I now hear that the revised publication date for Implied Spaces is now May 20.

2008, if you were beginning to wonder.

Bate your breath, the book is coming!

Blaxploitation Plus!

Last week Turner Classic Movies had a double feature of Blacula and Scream, Blacula, Scream. This is not exactly the sort of fare for which I subscribe to Turner Classic Movies, but I managed to stand it for, oh, ninety minutes or so, mainly thanks to the lead actor, William Marshall. Here was this classically trained Shakespearean actor, with enormous stage presence and a deep, resonant opera-singer's voice . . . and in his best-known role he's wearing a cheesy cape, outrageous sideburns, and plastic fangs.

Such is the way of popular culture. You end up remembered for the stuff you'd rather forget.

Still, Marshall manages to give the character a tragic dimension. (Tragic, that is, beyond the fact that he's a 200-year-old African prince who wakes up in an LA full of blaxploitation stereotypes.)

The films were a reasonably successful cross between low-budget horror and blaxploitation, which was low-budget by definition. All the vampire tropes, plus big afros, a good-looking love interest, tall heels, a protagonist who wreaks vengeance on Whitey (particularly when Whitey's wearing a police uniform), and really great period dialogue. ("Hey, dude, that's a baaaaad cape!")

Of course it was produced by a white guy, Samuel Z. Arkoff, who claimed that "Arkoff" stood for "Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy, Fornication," all of which he tried to include in each of his movies. (There are those who claim it can't be blaxploitation if it wasn't made by a white film company, a contention I don't propose to explore.)

Blacula kicked off a whole series of horror/blaxploitation crossover movies. Blaxploitation crosses pretty well with other genres. There's Cleopatra Jones (blaxploitation/Bond films), The Legend of Nigger Charley (blaxploitation/Westerns), and The Last Dragon (blaxploitation/martial arts).

But why did it stop there? I mean, we had all these talented black actors, and plenty of producers like Arkoff and Roger Corman, and a whole tradition of doing all-black versions of formerly white fare such as The Wizard of Oz and Hello, Dolly.

Why not blaxploitation war pictures? Foxy Brown, She-Wolf of the SS! I mean, I'd pay for that!

Blaxploitation/sword and sandal: Jive Sucka Caesar. (And come to think of it, if you remember that Maciste was supposed to be black, you could say that blaxploitation and sword-and-sandal were together from the beginning!)

And we've already got Afro Samurai, starring the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, so I guess that particular crossover has already been crossed.

There really haven't been any blaxploitation/science fiction crossovers that I know of (Brother from Another Planet doesn't count--- it was too sincere to be exploitative.) Fear of a Black Planet would be a pretty good title.

What genres have I missed? Feel free to exploit this topic!

Go Boom

So Wired's defense blog has posted an interesting article on the reactive materials revolution, followed immediately by the usual posts questioning exactly how revolutionary this is, and whether it would really work.

Whatever the case, it has to be said that this is pretty damn science-fictional. Picture your basic 5000-pound bunker-busting bomb, of which only 800 pounds is explosive, and the rest the steel casing. Then replace the steel casing with explosive that only goes off under certain circumstances. So instead of delivering 800 pounds of explosive to the target, you get two and a half tons of stuff that goes boom, perhaps in the form of a shaped charge designed to blast through, well, pretty much anything.

This applies to any form of munition: artillery shells, grenades, small-arms ammunition, and the parts of a rocket that aren't concerned with propulsion or guidance. Plus this may prove a boost to the Navy's rail-gun program.

You have to get a little worried when it comes to small-arms ammo, though. All that investment in body armor and armored vehicles, all gone, and our biggest tanks turned to swiss cheese by some guy with a medium-sized machien gun.

Gilded Falcons

For Dashiell Hammett fans--- and who isn't?--- we have new clews to the possible origin of both the Maltese Falcon and the Continental Op.

"Resting on the North entrance at Baltimore Street are two gold-gilded birds that could be mistaken for resting eagles, buty they're not, instead, they're falcons. Why, you may ask, is this significant? Because the Continental Trust building was also the location of the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton agency, which counted among its employees in the early '20s a gentleman from Southern Md., name of Dashiell Hammett--who would go on to write "The Maltese Falcon". He must have spent a lot of time looking at those big gilded falcons every morning."

So Hammett spend his days as a detective working out of the Continental building, and staring every day at gilded falcons? In Baltimore?

Naw--- gotta be a coincidence.