Ambrose & Elsewhere

Charles Stross apparently started an interesting meme in an f-locked post, taken up by jaylake (here) and burger_eater (here). The idea is for interested pro-writers to answer the questions concisely, giving the reader a quick timeline of their career.

“If I were a professional writer,” I thought, “I would do that, even though–”

I interrupted myself to point out, “You are now a professional writer, according to SFWA’s rather odd standards. You’re even an SFWA member: your first issue of the Bulletin came two weeks ago, or have you forgotten already?”

“I had forgotten,” I admitted. “I was going to blog about it so that I wouldn’t forget, but then I forgot to blog.”

“Go, and sin no more.”

“Hey, who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’ve forgotten by now. But wasn’t there something you were going to do?”

Oh. Yeah.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 12
* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter and taught myself to use it: 15
* Age when I wrote my first short story: 13
* Age when I wrote my first novel: 17
* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 26
* Number of rejections prior to first story sale: More than 200, I guess
* Lifetime number of rejections: Probably between 200 and 300–possibly more
* Age when I sold my first short story: 43
* Age when I wrote a saleable novel: 45
* Age when I sold that novel: 48
* Novels written between age 17 and age 45: 5
* Novels written since age 45: parts of 3
* Age now: 48
* Age when the writing money coming in exceeded my day-job: not yet
* Number of books sold: 2 (novels)
* Number of short stories sold: 12
* Number of titles in print: none yet
* Number of titles in production or pre-production: 2 novels

I was going to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, that I don’t think my numbers are necessarily predictive of other people’s success. I was slow off the mark submitting anything for publication, and I finally settled down to the task of writing adventure fantasy for the magazines well after the American magazine market turned against such stories. (I’d put the end-point around the death of Fantastic, in 1980 or so.) And through the plague of Tolkien imitators, a.k.a. the 1980s, I was resolved to not write anything that resembled a trilogy about the Final Conflict Between Good and Evil. I did not resolve to write unreadable semi-gibberish; it just worked out that way.

The purpose of the meme is apparently to warn and frighten, not advise in the usual sense. But I did learn two things from my long career of failure which may be useful for those who want to write professionally (if what I do is professional): know your markets (especially pay attention to emerging markets) and get an agent for booklength work.

For people who just want to spend their life writing, I have only one piece of advice, but you know it already. Write what you want to write. That kind of work can sustain you when no one else likes it, when no one else even gets it. Like I say, I know you know this, but the ghost of Austin Tappan Wright is glaring at me through a nearby window, making me say it again. And we’ve all been there.

1. You stumble across one unicorn, then all of a sudden you’re in a herd of the reclusive beasts. I was looking for something else on Google Books this afternoon when I found that an old favorite of mine, Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn, had been Googled. The book is still in print, and easy to find used copies of on Amazon and elsewhere, but it’s cool that the current publisher unleashed the whole contents for online reading (at Google and apparently on their own website, but apparently their server’s a little wonky; I couldn’t make a connection to it).

[Edited to add: They seem to have dropped the footnotes, though, so anyone thinking of buying a copy might be better off with an older edition. The Dover edition, which I snapped up in the 90s and has worn pretty well, has all the references, the index, and a couple of decent illustrations, all of which are lacking in the e-version online.]

2. Practically the only non-bad news from Mumbai in this terrible week concerned Emmanuele Lattanzi, a Neapolitan living in Mumbai who first escaped from the terrorists attacking the Oberoi hotel, and then voluntarily returned there to bring milk to his baby daughter and comfort to his wife, still imprisoned in the hotel. A small victory can count for a lot.

3. I only report this result because it’s so unexpected.

Your rainbow is strongly shaded red.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is says about you: You are a passionate person. You appreciate energetic people. You get bored easily and want friends who will keep up with you.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

I suspect most people who know me might tag me with a frostier rainbow, and I don’t really get bored easily, except at sporting events. So it’s possible that this quiz is not 100% infallible. Caveat quaesitor.

Baroque music always makes me feel autumnal (and vice versa). There were more professional videos on YouTube, but I liked the way these guys swung into the 4th Brandenburg.

A happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate it today; a happy Thursday to everyone.

Wednesday is my day to group-blog at the Black Gate website. My first entry is here, in which I babble incoherently about Morlock, unicorns, and my obscure feelings of dread when I think about Austin Tappan Wright. Feel free to comment there or here… or just tiptoe quietly away.

[edited to add]

There’s a burst of activity going on at the Black Gate site, with content being added on a more-than-daily-basis, and the new design includes RSS feeds. For those who want to keep track via LiveJournal there’s an account already set up: blackgatefeed.

1. One thing that’s been bothering me about all this news focused on Citigroup: it keeps reminding me of that terrible song by “‘Jefferson’ ‘”Starship”‘”–you know the one: “We Built This City.” (No, I’m not going to link to it. I don’t want that on my conscience.) Maybe Citibank used to use it in their ads, I’m not sure, but the association seems to be ineluctable (an ugly word for an ugly thing). I try to drive it out with this but it’s not working very well.

2. Work proceeds on the sequel to Blood of Ambrose. (No, I never get tired of linking to that page.) I wrote through one of those blank spaces over the weekend–one where I knew what came before and what came after and that something would have to happen in between but I wasn’t sure what it was. A voracious lake troll with braided ear-hair showed up out of nowhere–I literally had no idea that such a being existed in Morlock’s world. But he seemed to belong there, so I didn’t kick him out.

3. Groupblogging has started in earnest at the Black Gate website. David Soyka, BG‘s occasional short fiction reviewer posted Sunday; Judith Berman (author of the Nebula-nominated “Awakening” as well as the remarkable Native American fantasy Bear Daughter) posts today about conventions and intelligibility. Ryan Harvey and Howard Jones are also going to pitch in, and I’m slated for Wednesdays, starting this week. So I guess I’d better give it some thought in advance: these lake trolls don’t always show up when you need them. Busy braiding their ear-hair, no doubt, the heedless grishk-gnawing bastards.

Word on the street is that the peerless Holly Black and her peer, sf historian and YA author Justine Larbalestier, have tired of championing their favorite imaginary critters (unicorns and zombies respectively) in sordid smackdowns through all the back alleys and undertubes of the internet and are settling the matter in the only reasonable way, by co-editing an anthology titled Zombies Vs. Unicorns. That’s high concept so high it smacks of genius. Or some sort of hallucinogen.

I’m a noncombatant in the zombie-unicorn wars, but I have to admit I incline a little toward the widely loathed unicorn. They may have been pop-cultivated into my-little-ponies-with-spikes, but they still strike me as a powerful symbol of otherworldliness. There are no unicorns around here (wherever “here” is): if you see a unicorn you are there instead. I’m thinking of the occasional appearances of the unicorn in Zelazny’s Amber series (the original five, not the saddeningly inept sequel books), or Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Dunsany wrote a couple of stories (The King of Elfland’s Daughter and maybe the best of all the Jorkens stories, “Hunting the Unicorn”) involving unicorn hunts, a notion which has always struck me as deeply depraved. But at least Dunsany’s unicorns were remarkable beasts, whose presence indicated escape from the fields we know.

Unfortunately, that’s not what most readers seem to think of when they read the word “unicorn”, and it’s audience reaction that seals the deal (or doesn’t), not the writer’s intent.

Okay, so I’ve been blithely posting about squirrels and exoplanets as if there were nothing on my mind except my hair (not much of a burden these days). But truly all this while I’ve been seething inside with unshed news, and now it can be told.

The page for Blood of Ambrose is up at the Pyr site, along with the final cover art by Dominic Harman, who has done stunning art for the Temeraire books, among others. (The page text says that the cover is not final, which is technically true, as there are some design issues which may be tweaked, but that’s the cover image.) It’s in the nature of things that I would think this image is mind-blowingly cool: I especially like the murder of crows, the three moons, the Lankhmar-like cityscape of Ontil, and Morlock’s threatening stance.

Fans of the thrice-greatest Chuck Lukacs should not despair: I don’t think I’m spilling any secrets when I say that he’s contributing some typically great interior art.

As far as the text goes, the patient, persistent and insightful proofreader saved me from uncounted crimes and confusions, including chronic and persistent Capitalitis. (“The Fat Cat Lay On The Mat” is not really more impressive than “The fat cat lay on the mat”–it just thinks it is.) I did resplit a couple of the infinitives she unsplit for me, because I am starting to feel that the split infinitive is not so much a right as an obligation. But reading the novel again, with my eyes hovering right over the text (focusing on actual yes-this-is-really-happening-no-fooling publication), was an interesting experience, giving me a lot to think about (on a sentence level, even a word-by-word level) as I write new stuff.

Now, though, I think I have to get up from the keyboard and run around just to bring this buzz down to near-safe levels.

You know those demented squirrels who wait a moment before a vehicle comes along a street to dash in front of the wheels? One of these leaped out as I was biking past the other day.

“Hey!” I shouted, to scare him away, but by that time he had already bounced off the spokes of my front wheel. As I glanced over my shoulder he was dashing madly back whence he’d come.

I sort of felt like I’d failed to do my duty by Darwin and future generations of squirrelkind by not breaking his stupid neck. On the other hand, my bike still has clean hands, so to speak: let the local squirrels seek more willing filters for their gene pool, say I.

[I don’t know why I say “he.” I guess these guys always remind me of the dopey thrillseekers from old Mountain Dew commercials.]

Looks like we’ve finally got actual photos of exoplanets (better quality than VSOP planets, but more expensive, as I understand it).

Aftermath
Siegfried Sassoon

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

–March 1919