Musings on my muse: The care and feeding of my inner control freak

If you met me, you would probably think I'm perfectly normal.  But inside, I do have a quirk that makes me a tad different from most folks: on one level, I'm a control freak. This might surprise a lot of people who see me as reasonably laid back (except when I'm worried about my kids, and then I freak out).  

But I'm a different person when I write books. It's not just being a writer that makes me different. Technology has made it much easier to write and to publish, which has revealed that gazillions of folks have that ambition. Some of them write hoping to make money, some write hoping for recognition or fame, and some write because they enjoy it. I write because I want people to read what I have written. Let me stress that—what I have written. What appeals to me writing stories is that by writing them as science fiction or fantasy, I control not only the characters but the setting. I can create my own worlds, each with its own appearance, environment, inhabitants, and cultures. And I can populate those worlds with whatever characters I think would make for an interesting story.  

In the Wakanreo trilogy (Alien Bonds, Alien Vows, and Alien Skies), I created a world where  an alien people mate because of biological reaction that cannot be controlled. I wanted to create a society in which sex was completely divorced from morality, and where nudity was not linked to a desire to provoke a sexual reaction. I also foresaw greater equality between the sexes and among socioeconomic groups; because there was no such thing as marriage, either arranged or from affection, and divorce did not exist, class structures were too difficult to enforce. Also, since pairing off was purely pheromone-driven, looks didn't matter. Add to this the question of love; just because you paired off with someone doesn't mean you have to love him or her.

In Tribes, I wanted my readers to inhabit a world where there was one overriding loyalty, at least in a legal sense. Belonging to a tribe was a a life-long and immutable thing. One's tribe provided security, a safety net against disaster, and also determined what was legal for an individual. On the other hand, if someone had no tribe, his life was doomed to slavery, drudgery, and degradation. Interjecting a slave into such a setting provided a way to see how the other characters behave toward him.

But setting a story on another world or in the future isn't the only way to control all the facets of my story. In Hidden Magic, I gave some characters magical abilities, but plunked them down in a society that feared and suppressed magic. I made them brother and sister, and then, because I enjoy a romance, I had each of them find someone they loved.  

I don't only read science fiction and fantasy. I enjoy mysteries, historical fiction and historical romance, and even sometimes young adult novels. But I don't think I would ever write in those genres because I would be stuck with the rules imposed by reality. 

Writing the future in uncertain times

In some ways, humans have always lived in perilous times. In the past, life spans were shorter because poor nutrition and disease killed many people well before old age got the chance to. Now, however, science, which enabled more crops, a better understanding of nutrition, and the development of antibiotics and other life-saving drugs, has also created the technology of rapid world-wide travel. The corona virus designated as COVID-19 has spread at an unprecedented speed to create what feels like an overnight global pandemic.

The resulting lock-down of society in an effort to slow the spread of the virus has threatened the world's economy and put countless people out of work. This is scary as hell for a lot of people, and it has highlighted the difference between jobs in the digital world, which can be done anywhere, and jobs in the physical world, which require a person to be present. It also illustrated the length of our supply chain. If people stop going to restaurants, it's not just restaurant owners and cooks and kitchen and wait staff who suffer, it's the suppliers who sell them food, and the truckers who transport it,and the farmers who grow it, and the people who sell the farmers seed and tractors and fertilizer. We are all more economically connected than we ever realized.

If you think about it, though, this kind of epic event also affects people who write stories set in the future. There is no way this pandemic won't have an impact on our history. Once reason I always set my science fiction stories a thousand years into the future (except for Turnabout) is I didn't feel comfortable predicting the shorter term future.

Look at George Orwell's 1984, or Arthur C. Clarke and his series that began with 2001:A Space Odyssey. Orwell only went forward 30-some years. Clarke used about the same time leap (but then the setting jumped forward with the next book, finally ending a thousand years into the future with 3001.). But both books have, of course, been proven wrong. Orwell's story has had an impact on our language and political discourse, but it didn't actually happen (although it is looking more likely every day that Donald Trump is in office). Arthur C. Clarke's story became a visually stunning movie as well as a novel but we went to the moon and did not find any alien artifacts.

In a thousand years there might not even be people anymore. Who knows how many pandemics are going to happen and what their impact will be? I will keep writing, but the future now seems more uncertain than ever.

DRIFTERS is coming out April 14!

I'm happy to announce the upcoming release of a new book, a YA science fiction adventure called Drifters.  The story is set in my ThreeCon universe but there are no characters or events from other books. Here is the blurb:

In the far future, sixteen-year-old Jehan Amato lives on Menkar VII, a colony world only recently rediscovered by the rest of the galaxy. After a run-in with a dangerous gang that wants to exploit his secret psy talent for opening locks without tools, Jehan is sent to live in a Drifter caravan with his estranged father. But though Jehan, who has lived in New Hope City all his life, is initially wary of the nomadic people and their unfamiliar customs, in the caravan he comes to learn things about his family and himself that will change his life forever.

There will be a paperback version, and the ebook version is available for preorder on Kindle. Other ebook vendors will follow soon after I finish the epub work.

Note that Drifters is my first book with Snowy WIngs Publishing, a cooperative venture of many YA authors. I also hope to have a book out later this year with their sister imprint Crimson Fox Publishing. That book will be a fantasy romance; the working title is Bag of Tricks.

Cover reveal for Drifters will be April 1.

The Ins and Outs of My Recent Fussy Librarian Promotion

First, Happy Valentine's Day! I hope someone gave you a valentine.

Second, if you're not familiar with ebook promotional newsletters, basically, a company creates an email list of ebook buyers (subscribers have to opt in, but it's free to them) and then charges authors and publishers to include their books in a daily email to subscribers. There are many of these services now. BookBub is the biggest name (and the hardest to get into), but there are others, including Book Gorilla, Bargain Booksy/Free Booksy (they separate free books and cheap books into their two emails and if you want both, you have to subscribe to both.), The Fussy Librarian, and Ereader News Today (ENT). When books are on sale but not free, the email entry has an affiliate link and the company gets a small cut from the sale.

On February 8, I ran a Fussy Librarian promotion for The Sixth Discipline (a free ebook!) . The results were pretty good. I had not used FL in a while, so I didn't know what to expect.

I gave away hundreds of copies, mostly on Kindle. And of course, even though the email itself usually generates "sales" for the one day it runs, Amazon's online algorithms push popular books to readers so increased "sales" continues for a few days. As you can see in the screen snap below, the promo offered links to the the book on Kindle, Nook (B&N), Apple, Kobo and Google Play. The results in the list below the screen snap are "sales" for the day of the promo plus three days after.

Vendor:           No. of Copies given away February 8, 9, 10, and 11

Amazon Kindle: 277 (plus 5 paid*), 88 (plus 2 paid*), 28 (plus  1 paid*), 21 (none paid*)
Google Books: 20, 3, 2, 0
iBooks/Apple Books: 19, 0, 0, 0
Barnes & Noble 0, 0, 0, 0
Smashwords: 0, 1, 2, 0 (note: their link was not listed in the ad; these are normal numbers for comparison)
Kobo 0, 0, 0, 0

* The Kindle version wasn't free in all Amazon bookstores so the paid numbers represent foreign sales.

Note that The Sixth Discipline was my first published title, and it came out in 2011. It is free on Amazon only because Smashwords lets an author make a book free, and because Smashwords is a distributor as well as an e-tailer, the book is thus free on other platforms as well. Amazon practices price matching (which is why you see "Tell us about a cheaper price" links on a book's Amazon page);  if you make the book free elsewhere, Amazon will make the Kindle version free also. These days, I usually give away from zero to three Kindle copies every day, so promotions are helpful to boost "sales."

I think in a way, these numbers do a good job of representing how well each vendor is doing at ebook sales. Amazon is way ahead of the pack; its second day number beat all the others' first day totals combined. But Google and Apple both have a significant ebook presence, On the other hand, Barnes & Noble is pretty much dead in the water, and Kobo is going nowhere (at least in the US; it is more popular overseas where Amazon is less dominant). This explains one of the main reasons Amazon can tempt authors and publishers into enrolling their books in Kindle Unlimited: they give up small sales numbers on other platforms in return for money from KU borrows.

Right now both The Sixth Discipline and its sequel No Safe Haven are available only in ebook form but I am having new covers made, and formatting the books for print. I hope to have paperback versions available in a month or so. I might run another promotion after that, as a test of the new covers.

A word to other authors: Giving away this book makes some sense because there is a direct sequel that is not free, and I always see increased sales of it after a promotion of the first book. Giving away a standalone book is not usually as good an idea.  For one thing, a huge number of free ebooks are never read. Making a book free eliminates the cost barrier, so a lot of readers download a free book first, and then look to see if they want to read it. If you have books that are very similar, it can still be a good idea to make a book free for a day or two, in that it can drive up your sales numbers on Amazon temporarily and thus get the book in front of a lot of readers through the "customers also bought" function. That's another benefit of Kindle Unlimited; authors can make their books free or discounted for short periods of time.

Taking Inventory

I'm doing final corrections on Alien Vows, getting it ready for launch, but I stopped to take stock of my "stack" of manuscripts.  I put the word in quotes because the stack is digital; the books exist only as files on my hard drive.

I have been writing seriously since 1992, but I didn't start self-publishing until 2011. Since then I have published nine (soon to be ten) novels and one novella.

The unpublished novels list looks like this:

Fantasy
Bag of Tricks
The Return of Magic

Science Fiction
This Nameless World
Child of the Sand (very rough draft)

Science Fiction Romance
Alien Skies (Book 3 of the Wakanreo series)
Worlds Apart
Ice and Fire

YA Science Fiction
Nomads (or possibly Nomads of Menkar 7)
Playing with Fire -- partial m.s.  

The next one in line to publish will undoubtedly be Alien Skies because I want to finish the Wakanreo series. After that I need to decide which direction I want to go. I might alternate, and do a fantasy next and then a science fiction romance, and then repeat. This Nameless World will probably go to the bottom of the list because it's currently at 240,000 words, the longest book I ever wrote.  That's about twice as long as most of my novels, but I don't think I can split it into two books because there's no resolution point in the middle of the book.

In contrast, I have also written six short stories. It's not that I was trying to write mostly novels;it's that the stories that started in my head were mostly novels. Go figure!

Writing in a series: why I created my own universe

I got a wonderful email the other day, from a reader who was requesting the free story I offer via this blog. It was the kind of email authors dream about because she said she had read The Sixth Discipline (which she got free in iBooks, but it's also free almost everywhere) and loved it enough to buy the sequel No Safe Haven, and loved it enough to buy all my other books in the iBooks store. On top of that, when I checked, she had left a review on iBooks! Talk about your ideal readers!

When I sent her the story, I suggested she read Tribes first, because it's most like the Haven books in overall tone, and I warned her that Shades of Empire is noticeably darker and more explicit than my other books. But when I was writing the email, it occurred to me that in some ways, the fact that she loved the Haven books so much could make it difficult for her to enjoy the other books.

Readers love books in a series. Once they find a character they like, they want to stick with him or her. When a local book club read my fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, one of the questions the readers asked me was did I have any books in a series.

Authors, on the other hand, often find it difficult keep finding new things to say about a character. The Haven “series” is only two books long, and I didn't know it would be two when I started it. As it turned out, I had too much story in my head for it to fit into one book. Fortunately, there was an eight-year gap in the story, which made a logical place to end the first book; I just had to be sure there was enough resolution of all but the one significant plot point that continues in the second book.

But in a sense, most of my books are in a series. All of my far future science fiction stories take place in a universe in which people from earth colonized other worlds in a way that left them cut off from our earth. The societies and cultures they created varied, depending on why they left their own world. I call them "sleeper worlds," partly because the colonists traveled in suspended animation. In the Haven books, there were three distinct groups on the colony world of Haven: one looking for new resources, one wanting isolation to experience harmony with nature, and one hoping for a total lack of government. In Tribes, the world was a prison colony, and its culture and government evolved from prison gangs. The colony world in The Nostalgia Gambit is an exception in that it's not a sleeper world.

I named my universe the ThreeCon universe, for the Third Confederation of Planets, the organization I created to oversee commerce and other interaction between the worlds. Although there are no characters shared between stories (except for the Haven books), the universe has a consistent, shared history. There are events mentioned in one that carry over into other stories, too.

My next book, most likely titled Saronna's Gift will be a romance, but it's also set in the ThreeCon universe, and the sleeper world the story takes place on was founded as religious colony by a charismatic but despotic leader who believed in an Old Testament-style patriarchy. After a few centuries of isolation, the world is a pretty awful place, in a lot of ways. The story starts when a young woman's father takes her to a city to sell her. I'm hoping the book will appeal to both romance readers and science fiction readers.

Really, my kind of series is the kind authors like: low overhead for the writer in creating the overall history, and a new set of characters each time. I don't know how much benefit that is to readers. If you have an opinion, let me know in the comments.

The future is (more or less) now!

The future has always been now, in the sense that time never stands still. Once someone gets an idea for a better way to do something—and starts to work on it—things starts to change. What's different now is how much the pace of change has accelerated.  When my daughter was much younger, she asked me if I fought with my siblings over what videotapes to rent at the video store (because she and her brother could never agree). I explained that we didn't have videotape or VCRs when I was a kid. Now, of course, it's either DVD's from a vending machine or downloads from Amazon or Netflix. Baring some kind of freaky time reboot, her generation will be the only one to rent videotapes as kids.

There's a science fiction blog called i09 that has a wonderful post about predictions from science fiction that came true in 2012. They're all pretty cool, but the three I found most intriguing were these:

• Dawn of the Cyborgs:  South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is a double amputee who raced in the Olympics wearing blade-shaped prosthetic legs. His nickname is (naturally) Blade Runner. 
• Flowers for Five Unnamed Rhesus Monkeys: Scientists were able to improve the cognitive ability of monkeys by implanting a chip in their brains. And unlike poor Algernon the mouse, this effect didn't wear off.
• Warp Factor One: NASA has begun working on a design for a faster-than-light drive! It's all very theoretical, but still, it is so cool that NASA is trying to "Make it so!"

This is one reason it's so hard to write science fiction! Reality keeps catching up!

Welcome to the future!

One thing you come to understand over time is, you're basically turning into your parents. I used to get “letters” from my mother that were just envelopes full of newspaper clippings. Whenever she saw a story that she thought someone would be interested in, Mom would clip it from the paper and put it aside. When she had several stories, she would shove them into an envelope, add a stamp and an address, and off it would go to inform its intended audience of whatever my mom thought was so interesting.

I do the same thing, but faster. If I see a blog post or online article I think my husband, kids, or even friends would be interested in, I send an email with just the link and the article title (Shareholic makes it really easy).  Instead of envelopes full of newspaper, they get emails full of links. At least my efforts are tidier.

Disk storage is something else that has changed radically in form and appearance. I remember our first 40 BM hard drive; it weighed as much as a dictionary, and it was about the same size. The other day we upgraded my daughter's phone, and the Verizon guy took the SIM card out of her “old” phone to move it to the new one. I had not seen a SIM card in a while; I recall thinking they were quite small back when I got my first cell phone—maybe half as big as a credit card—but now they are teensy. I swear this thing was the size of a fake fingernail—a pinky finger fake fingernail—only much thinner. One good sneeze and you could lose it forever. And yet the damn thing held dozens and dozens of photos and a few videos, too.

Some science fiction tries to predict the future, but it's difficult to know which direction things will go and how fast. We're not at all likely to have colonies on the moon any time soon, let alone on other planets, but in the developed world, most people carry their own personal communicators that also do countless other things. And while flying cars seem (thankfully) a long ways off, driverless cars are much more imminent.

And of course, there are always ebooks and ereaders. I can't wait for my new Kindle to get here! Rest assured that I'll post a review of it once it does.

Hugo Winners for 2012 (Hugo did NOT win a Hugo)

The Hugos were awarded Sunday night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago (aka Chicon 7).   The winners are listed below.  SFWA has a list of all the nominees for each category as well as the winners.

Best Novel: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s)

Best Novelette: “Six Months, Three Days,” Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com)

Best Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

Best Related Work: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight (Gollancz)

Best Graphic Story: Digger, by Ursula Vernon (Sofawolf Press)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Game of Thrones (Season 1), created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss; written by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman, Jane Espenson, and George R. R. Martin; directed by Brian Kirk, Daniel Minahan, Tim van Patten, and Alan Taylor (HBO)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who, ”The Doctor’s Wife,” written by Neil Gaiman; directed by Richard Clark (BBC Wales)

Best Semiprozine: Locus, edited by Liza Groen Trombi, Kirsten Gong-Wong, et al.

Best Fanzine: SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo

Best Fancast: SF Squeecast, Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Paul Cornell, Elizabeth Bear, and Catherynne M. Valente

Best Editor, Long Form: Betsy Wollheim

Best Editor, Short Form: Sheila Williams

Best Professional Artist: John Picacio

Best Fan Artist: Maurine Starkey

Best Fan Writer: Jim C. Hines

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not techincally a Hugo): E. Lily Yu

Even though Neil Gaiman has won nearly every award out there. I'm glad his Dr. Who episode won because I loved it! Hugo was a sweet movie, but it wasn't really science fiction or even fantasy. I did not make it through the novels, but "The Paper Menagerie" was my favorite of the short stories.  Also, John Picacio was overdue, so go John!  I will be looking at the voting once it's announced to see how close everything was. I always like to know if my vote put my favorite over the top.

Shades of Empire is ready for the copy editor!

Most of my fiction is far-future science fiction that takes place in imagined worlds. Sometime in May I hope to publish a true space opera. The universe is the same one found in Tribes, but none of those characters appear in Shades of Empire, in which much of the plot takes place on an interstellar cargo ship. As the title suggests, the novel also includes an emperor (and an empress, too). It's a multi-threaded story with many characters and subplots, and I'm hoping folks find it an interesting read.

I'm adding a photo of  the Eta Carinae nebula to this post, in celebration of my story. NASA has some great photos of space if you're looking for one.

Going mental in ebooks

I have been struggling with a problem unique to digital publishing. In print publishing, you have more control over the appearance of the page. In ebooks, there is no page, and the same book can appear differently on different ebook platforms. All ereaders let the reader change the text size, and some let him change the font (typeface). On some ereaders, particularly the Kindle, italic and bold text are not as noticeable as they appear in print.

This isn't that much of a problem in the average novel. Italic isn't used that often, and usually it's only one or two words. Bold is rarely used. But in spec fic, you sometimes have situations not found in non-genre fiction. My next novel Tribes, for example, has a plot point that involves technology creating a way to communicate telepathically. This results in “dialog” that's not really dialog. This is text that needs to look different on the screen.

I tried sending draft files to my Kindle with this text in bold and in italic and neither was distinct enough. Eventually, I concluded the only thing to do was to set that text off with a character not usually found in fiction, perhaps [square brackets] or {curly brackets}. I lean toward square brackets because I think the curly brackets look too geeky, but I'm wavering.

Once I decide, I'll be almost ready to send the files off to the conversion house. The cover is taking shape, but I asked for once last tweak, so I'm waiting on that. I'm excited!