Category: career

Absurdity

Without Naming Names

I didn’t really enjoy Archon very much this year.  I hesitate to pin blame because so many things are going on right now that my dissatisfaction could be result of factors completely unrelated.  Any number of them might have coalesced into the hazy funk that seemed to follow me around all weekend.

But there did seem to be a lack of focus at the convention and I was surprised at the lack of meaningful programming.  I volunteered to do two workshops, one on Saturday the other on Sunday, but except for titles and brief descriptions, there was no structure to speak of.  I showed up and improvised and the people in attendance seemed satisfied.  Copious notes were being taken in any case.

I did get to spend time with people I only see at conventions.  A tip o’ the hat through the internets to Selina and Lynn, Vic, Tom, Rich and Michelle, and a handful of others who made it worth my while to show up.

One thing I will say, the convention returned to Collinsville, Illinois, which is about 15 miles from my house.  Not an onerous drive except for getting over the bridge, on which this weekend there were repairs and therefore traffic jams.   The convention facilities themselves are okay—it is, after all, a convention center (Gateway) and it is designed for such things.  It used to be there was only one good hotel there, but a Drury has been added.  The dearth of decent restaurants is a problem.  I don’t consider Arby’s, Bandana’s, Ponderosa, Ruby Tuesday, or  Steak’n’Shake decent restaurants.  Fast food, sure.  But there’s still only one really good restaurant there, Porters, which is fine eating and expensive as hell.  Last year Archon moved to Westport Plaza.  I know there were complaints about it being spread out and the dealer’s rooms were on the other side of the plaza from the actual programming, but it was a cool setting, good food, decent hotels, and…

Yeah, it’s closer to my house, but more importantly there’s no bridge that is always being repaired.

Even so, that doesn’t explain my loss of enthusiasm.  I think I’m just really tired from the last eight months.  I’m not working on anything right now but what I want to be working on, till my agent tasks me with more revisions or something, so I’ve decided to work on the small stack of short stories I have.  Rich Horton was at Archon and pointedly lamented my non-output of short material.  So that’s what I’m doing now.

And learning my away around Twitter.  One more distraction, but I’m told it is necessary for my coming popularity vis-a-vis my career.

Things just seem unsettled lately.  There are reasons which I won’t go into here, but they seem to be ganging up on me.  I’m so easily distracted, I throw my hands up at merest provocation and put off till tomorrow work I really need to be doing today.  For instance, the story I should be working on is staring at my back just now, on the other computer, while I explain all this to you.  It’s a cool story, too, if I can just bring it home.  So while it’s pleasant chatting with you here, and you’re such a terrific audience patiently listening to me gripe about not much, I’m going to hit the publish button and go do that cool story.

But I wanted to tell you about Twitter.  Really.  (See? I’m not a Luddite.)

career

Bouchercon 2011

So I have now attended a Bouchercon.

I’ve attended so many SF conventions that they’ve become, if not normal, at least comfortable.   I pretty much know what to expect.  Bouchercon, while in many ways similar to an SF convention, is different enough that I felt like a newbie and a bit like an outsider.  I don’t know the players, I don’t know all the rules, and I didn’t know what to expect.

There were no costumes, no gamers, no room parties (at least not open room parties), no art show, and an absence of what I like to think of secondary and tertiary effluvia in the dealers room—that is, tables of jewelry and fake weapons and action figures and the like.  The dealers room was almost all books.  There were a few DVDs and CDs, but 95% of it was books and magazines.

By Saturday I felt pretty comfortable.  These are people gathered together for the love of a genre and some of the conversation on the panels bridged the gap to SF, confirming that the critical divisions are not between genres but with an Academic snobbery that basically says if it isn’t James Joyce or Hemingway or Pynchon, it’s garbage.  I understood that and subsequently I could talk to these folks without a translator.

I got to chat (briefly but not frivolously) with Val McDermid and Laura Lippman.  I did attend one publisher’s party, but I ended up leaving soon after arriving because I simply couldn’t hear in the crowd.  An age thing, I think, I’m beginning to lose the ability to separate out voices in groups.

Bought too many books.  Again.  But then I brought more than twice as many as I bought home—there is a big publisher presence in the form of free copies.  I have stacks to go through.

As to that, I feel like I’m starting over.  I am profoundly under-read in mystery and thriller.  I recognized many names but then there were so many more I had no clue about.  But that makes it kind of exciting.  I really do have ideas for this kind of fiction.  It will be great to have a chance to write some of it.

As to whether or not I’ll go to another one…that depends on the status of the career.  Next year’s Bouchercon is in Cleveland.  The year after that, Albany, then Long Beach, and then Raleigh.  If I’m doing well enough, quite likely we’ll go to couple of them.  Wish me luck.

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New Directions

I’m attending Bouchercon this week, here in St. Louis.  In the last few years I’ve been drifting toward crime fiction, partly in an attempt to cultivate new fields with a view toward getting my rather stagnant career moving, partly because I’ve always written something like it.

The Robot Mysteries were, as advertised, mysteries of a sort.  Crime was happening in them, investigators investigated, macabre stuff occurred.  There was a bit of it in Metal of Night and a couple of major thefts (and murders) were integral to Peace & Memory.  Certain Remains was a mystery, even with noir elements, and the one, poor orphaned Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf, was very noirish in tone.

The alternate history, now making its newly-launched circuit in search of publisher, is very much a murder mystery, wrapped around a bit of steampunk.  I moved on from there to write a novel set in the 18th Century that is pretty much a murder mystery and the last book I finished is a straight up and down contemporary murder mystery.  Plans exist to continue all three into future novels.

So when I wondered to my agent if I should maybe attend Bouchercon (after being reminded by good pal Scott Phillips that it was, y’know, right here in town this year) I got a loud, forceful “Well, yeah!”

So in view of a potential new career, I’m updating my image a bit, trying it on for size, as it were, and seeing how it fits.  I asked Scott what to expect and he said “Well, for one thing, there are no costumes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but really all we have to do is dress well and we’re in costume.”

To which he laughed and informed me that on average the women dress to the nines and the guys show up in jeans and t-shirts.

Well.  I think I’ll just go as myself.

But there are so many of them that it can be hard to choose…

Tonight the festivities kick off with a pre-Bouchercon get-together in University City at a place called Meshuggah’s where monthly readings take place, a gig called Noir at the Bar.  I’ll be there.

So will my new agent. (One of them, that is—I have two, which is kind of…wow.)  Yeah, despite my attempt at a cool demeanor, I’m jazzed about that.  Of all the “agents” I’ve had, I have only ever met two of them, both shortly before they left their respective agencies and me.

Anyway, I probably won’t post anything till next week.  I’m stepping off the platform to head in a new direction.  Here’s hoping it takes me where I want to go.

career

Necessary Notes

Couple of things.  One, as noted in the previous post, I’m going to Bouchercon, here in St. Louis this year.  The other event coming up—well, Archon, of course, the first weekend of October, but I always try to be there—will be the local independent bookstores bus tour on October 22nd, via St. Louis Alliance.  I’ll be at the Book House on Manchester Road from 11:00 AM on and then with readers for lunch.  Check the Alliance web page for details.

Today I spent doing some catch-up stuff.  Company left this morning, so I cleaned up a bit, walked the dog, then got together with Scott Phillips in U City for coffee.  Scott’s a great guy and I owe him for hooking me up with my new agent.  He has a new novel out and I urge you all to find it, buy it, read it.  The Adjustment  is prime Scott, quirky, disturbing, funny, and utterly unclassifiable.  (And although I have provided the Amazon link, please buy it from a local, preferably independent bookstore.  If you don’t, I’ll know, or I know people who will know, and once they know, well…)

After that, heading back home, I took a detour to visit a friend I don’t see enough of.  Vicky was home and we spent an hour or so visiting, something I need to do more often.  I’ve known Vicky for mumbles%handovermouth*muffle muffle years and, as with others, time has sort of slipped away and too much has gone by without enough contact.  Yeah, I’ve been busy (and sometimes just in no kinda mood to be friendly with anyone) and so has she, but friends are friends and there’s no real excuse.  If you delay and accept the excuses, one day you go back and find the place overgrown, abandoned, the windows busted, and the door boarded up.

 

After The Sale

 

Anyway, I’m back home now (obviously) and doing some more cleaning up and getting a bit annoyed at myself for being disorganized.  There’s more fiction to write, some music to do, and—at the moment perhaps most importantly—a nap that needs taking.  I can see it, right there, lying out in the open, unguarded.  All I need to do is reach out when no one is looking and take it.

 

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Just Getting Up In The Morning

Really, I’ve been up since 5:20 already.  We have company coming into town, so most of the day so far has been taken up with cleaning the house and arranging the guest room—which is at all other times my office.

But I sometimes feel that just being able to get up in the morning and do anything constructive is a minor miracle.  Oh, nothing significant about that thought.  Usually it’s a matter of choosing among several options and then deciding whether I have either the imagination or the energy to tackle any of them.  I often have a period of enervation after completing a novel and the older I get the more intense they seem to be.

I didn’t go to the gym this morning as I normally would have because of the incoming company and other scheduling conflicts.  I’d decided that before I found out about the company, but now I wonder if I’ll manage it Wednesday.  It is too easy to get into a habit of blowing off certain tasks for later.  For instance, I keep meaning to write a new short story (started one yesterday, much to my dismay) or pull out the half dozen I have in rough draft and get them in shape.  As long as there is a novel in process, I can feel righteous about putting them off.  But I have no excuse now other than just not feeling like it.

Not to mention all the things around the house that need tending to.  I do a fair job of keeping up with the entropy, but some things slip by and when I get around to them they have grown in size to unmanageable proportions.  I have to work up to tackling them.  So far, I always do, but there may come a day…

I’m going to Bouchercon.  Since at least two of the projects I have under submission to my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent?  I’m sure I did) are mysteries—though in truth at least half my oeuvre to date has been a hybrid of SF and mystery (I mean, it even says so on the cover of Mirage, Chimera, and Aurora,  an Asimov Robot Mystery), and there are even some noirish aspects to Remains—it seemed sensible to bite the bullet and go to the mystery convention, especially since it’s going to be here, in St. Louis.  The plus also is I get to meet my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent?  Oh, yeah, I did) face to face.

It’s been feeling like this year a number of things are going to get fixed.  All this getting up in the morning has to count for something, right?  But one thing I’ve discovered for certain, and it’s something that had been bothering me—I still love to write.  Since March I have been working long days on two of my novels, both of which have received major revisions.  Hell, the first one was gutted like a fish and rebuilt almost from the bottom up.  But because it felt like it was going somewhere, that something was going to come of it, I dived in and had a ball.  This was important.  I needed to know this, thought I’d been putting off even asking the question.

So getting up in the morning, while still occasionally a pain, has renewed meaning for me.  There’s a point to all this effort and that makes a huge difference.  Good may yet come of all this.

I do need to make better use of my time.  But that’s always been true.  So for now, adieu.  I’m off to make time bleed a little and get some more done.

career

Done (Almost)

So about an hour ago I typed up the last changes in The Spanish Bride, formatted it into a master doc, did the word count, printed out the last five chapters for Donna to savage review.  When she’s done I will make the final corrections and send it off to my agent.

I was asked to trim the fat—condense it—and it has lost 20 thousand words of excess.  Some of it may go back in eventually, but not much, I think.  A good deal of it was window-dressing.  I explained to my agent that, really, I can write a space opera and know pretty much exactly what to leave out, what to keep in, but going back the other direction threw all that in doubt.  How well-versed are people in the 18th Century?  Anyway, it has been educational.  When I get around to writing the next Ulysses Granger novel I should be a bit more concise right from the start.

So I have now completely rewritten two whole novels since March.  I’m going to go take a nap now.  Tomorrow…?  I’ll worry about that in the morning.

Art

Down. To It and Otherwise

But not depressed. Just tired. Sort of a twilight feeling.

I’m working on the last chapter of The Spanish Bride, an action/historical mystery/thriller/etc set in the uncrowded days of 1780s St. Louis.  This is about the fifth draft now and I think it’s ready.  Just one more chapter.

 

 

This is always a dangerous point in the process.  I see that finish line and I get anxious, I want it to be done, but the last stretch of a novel is where all the promise is supposed to pay off, so you shouldn’t hurry it up.

It will be fine.  After I finish this draft, Donna gets to read it and then I must go back and fix the things she indicates need fixing.

But I am tired.  I’ve been constantly redrafting a novel—this one and Orleans—since March.  I need a break.  A couple weeks to catch up on some other things.  I have a guest blog to write, things around the house to tend to, more photographs to finish, friends to catch up with.

The image above was taken the night of the Fourth of July.  A pall of smoke filled the neighborhood as if some battle had been fought (which ritualistically it had).  I’ve manipulated it a bit to make it a little stranger.

I’m going to go feed the dog and watch some tv now.

Absurdity

Playing Around

I’m trying another new theme.  One of these days I may build something all my own…or, at least, watch while someone who knows how to do it builds something for me at my direction.

But I like this one, I think I’ll leave it alone for a while.  It’s more in tune with what I like to think myself all about—broad vistas, cosmic scenery, special effects.  Well, maybe not so much special effects, but, you know, skiffy.

From what I have seen so far, I’m very much liking the new WordPress.  Of course, that means I’m distracted.  This is not the sort of writing I need to be doing just now.

I particularly like this feature, inserting images and adding text alongside.  This may be old hat to a lot of seasoned bloggers, but till now I haven’t been able to do it.  It’s more the sort of thing I’ve been wanting to do.  I have a lot of images that will serve fine as accent, but I don’t want them as the main attraction.

It’s Saturday and once again Donna is at work.  Audit season, we don’t see much of one another.  For the time being, that’s okay since I do have a book to finish.  Once I get done telling you all this, I have to go back to the 1780s and get with it.

I finished the first rewrite for my new agent (in case I haven’t mentioned that previously).  The alternate history is out the door.  My door.  She still has to pass on it and tell me it’s brilliant.  Meanwhile, I’m working on the historical mystery, and this week I ran into the chapter from hell.  One of those miserable pieces of writing that has a good deal of parts I don’t want to love, but embedded in a marsh of motionless gunk.  I finally figured out how to fix it, but it requires throwing a lot of what’s already there in the can, and I am loathe to do it.  As this is Saturday and my love is nowhere near (hell, even the dog is out of the house, at the groomer’s), I have no excuse.

So enough.  I have a couple of more studied posts I want to do later—one in particular on the new Yes album, which after three weeks I still quite like—and maybe some more political kvetching, of which there is ample to kvetch about.  But I must end this playing around now and do some serious work.  Really.  Right now.  I’m going.

Later.

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Treason To The Future

No, I’m not going off on some political rant.  At least, I don’t think so.  (I was accused recently of using my blog as a soapbox…well, I thought, isn’t that what it’s for?  The question is, how good is the soap.)

At our recent Dante session I was reminded of a quote I’d forgotten all about.  One of the best philosophical thinkers of the 20th Century was Alfred North Whitehead.  I recommend him.  Even where I disagree with him, there is plenty to stir the imagination and encourage new thought.  One of his better books, quite short and to the point, is The Function of Reason.  In the chapter three or thereabouts, we find this little gem.

“To set limits on speculation is treason to the future.”

By that, I read him as meaning that we must be free to speculate about where we’re going, what we hope to do, how we’ll make it happen.  All ideas are welcome, even bad ones, as long as we’re only speculating.  But more than that, it’s kind of one of those notions that ought to go without saying—all thinking is speculation, even problem solving, and to arbitrarily set limits, to say “You can’t talk about that,” is to shut the door on possible solutions to problems we may not even know we have yet.

I’m using that quote in a talk I’m doing tomorrow night in Columbia on What Is Science Fiction.  I think it answers a century-worth of ridicule and criticism toward the form that ought not to have come up to begin with, but which was predictable.  People are uncomfortable with change.  (Here’s a little bit of politics coming up.  Sorry about that.)  When you look at the current wrestling match going in the country—indeed, around the globe—there seems to be one basic demand from people with regards to the problems we face:  fix it but don’t change anything.

Science fiction is all about change.

There are two ways to look at change—as an inevitable force impossible to avoid or as a fate we seek to hide from.  Change is coming regardless, so hiding does no good, but it does do harm, because in hiding we surrender any say we might have in how change happens.  And when you do that, then whatever happens will probably be something you won’t like.

Preparing this talk reminded me why I’ve always liked science fiction in the first place.  I’ve never been afraid of the future.  The future, to me, has always been a place where the best could happen.  It might not, things might go sour, but it’s not inevitable, and even if we do go through a bad time, the future is still there, with potential.  When I was a kid, Today was always pretty much dull.  Tomorrow—and by that I mean TOMORROW! —held all the really cool stuff I knew would make life better.  By and large, I haven’t been terribly disappointed.  In spite of things transpiring that rather annoy, irritate, and anger me, there is much more that I find generally wonderful.

The trick is to be open to that part instead of stockpiling a list of complaints.