Win Or Sledgehammer

The dog started the day by demanding many a bellyrub and cuddle before he would deign to leave a warm bed–which, honestly, fair play and I did not mind. However, he followed it up by attempting to stamp on every hyacinth and daffodil in the backyard, forcing us to trudge around in circles while he sought the perfect place to pee as the temperature hovers near freezing.

I don’t even know. Then there was the Coffee Grinder Incident and I began to despair of ever getting some goddamn caffeine. Fortunately the Moka pot didn’t make me wait too long and now I am safely in my office, shivering with the aftereffects of Boxnoggin’s frigid bathroom break but grateful for the cup of java I’m finally managing to get down my poor sleepy gullet.

I have Flo Rida’s My House running through my head; it’s a supremely danceable tune. Yesterday it was fighting for supremacy with DNCE’s Cake By the Ocean, which starts out sounding like Uptown Funk to a degree which makes it mash with several other tracks on my skull radio. However, it is also supremely danceable, so I didn’t mind. Still, I’m glad to have just one song plaguing me at the moment–when I get three or four going, it’s usually a sign I need more work to keep the ol’ thinkmeat from consuming itself.

Yesterday was all administrivia and video meetings. Honestly I don’t know why anyone talks to me–I mean, sure, I’m hilarious, but I’m also A Lot and a crotchety misanthropist to boot. I got into publishing because it was a job I could handle from home while caring for toddlers (childcare costs would have eaten the proceeds from any other) and now I’m so used to setting my own schedule and arranging things to suit myself I’m largely unfit for not only any other career but also interacting with what one thinks of as “normal” people.

I get weird early, I stay weird, and it’s not gonna change.

Anyway, the Ides of March are tomorrow and the second tranche of sales and price drops for the month are coming ’round the bend. Today there is a cake to bake, plus wordcount to catch up on since I got barely 400 yesterday and I suspect they all have to be thrown out. I may have to reserve one day per week for goddamn bureaucratic nonsense so I can protect the rest of my working time. I need this book done and if I’m going indie at the rate I suspect (developments are underway) I also need a few other things in place.

My patience for incremental effort is being severely tested. I need a win or two. Maybe I’ll get one during walkies, or today’s run. If that doesn’t work, there’s a sledgehammer sitting to the right of my desk, and I’m sure I can find a way to use it around the yard for a bit.

…honestly, the prospect sounds more and more enticing the longer I think about it. Thursday got the first few hits in, but I’ve got a plan for the war entire.

Time to get swinging.

Awards, Co-Opted

Well, release day has come and gone, and I’m still a nervous wreck. That’s to be expected, since this series has had such an awful time being born. Recovery always takes thrice the time I think it will, even when I pad out the schedule to what I consider “reasonable”. This perhaps means I am an unreasonable person who drives herself too hard, or…you know what, I’m just going to drink more coffee.

The big news in my corner of publishing right now is the Sanford & Barkley report on what precisely went down with the 2023 Hugo Awards in Chengdu. Yes, it was censorship. Yes, the call was largely coming from inside the house–censorship and bribery often function indirectly, after all. And yes, this bears out my point that if an award is so easily co-opted by bad actors, perhaps it should not be so very prestigious.

I should, in the interests of clarity, make it explicit that I can say this because I am not and will never be an “awards”-type writer. The reasons are various and sundry, but the reason I mention this boils down to me not having any skin in this game. I am aware my position is relatively privileged in that respect. I would like to think that if this were not the case I would still say the same things, but upon that path lies hubris so it’s best to just be honest.

Look, most (if not all) literary awards are popularity contests. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the approbation of one’s peers and/or co-professionals is in many cases desirable indeed, and in a wider sense popular works are that way because they appeal to a wide number and variety of people. It’s a good thing to have other folks in your industry say openly that you’re fantastic at your job, and popular works that get more people reading and talking about books lift up the rest of publishing/bookdom, a rising tide heaving all boats up a few inches. Nothing is wrong with that AT ALL.

However, there is a dark side to any awards process. Those who are good at bureaucracy or brigading have a natural advantage when it comes to gaming such things, and any work which speaks to a wide number of people also speaks to their fears and collective id. The former is far more insidious than the latter, and will be relentlessly taken advantage of unless the awards process is constructed in such a way as to curb the enthusiasm of ill-meaning bureaucrats and bigots.

Ideally, an awards process constructed to curb those advantages garners prestige. In the real world, prestige is often bought, or a function of combined age and catering to dominant prejudices, and we are faced with one of the most highly sought and well-regarded awards in SFF being co-opted with stunning regularity by bigots and censorious dickwads. Those who have spoken about this problem when it surfaces face relentless harassment and mockery before being proven right every. damn. time. I don’t think this particular incident will end any differently. The inertia of the Hugos, the “it’s too haaaaard to change!”, are heavy indeed. The old-guard vested interests will simply wait for the storm to pass before going back to co-opting and pulling levers, and in another few years we’ll have yet another “omg the Hugos are fucked” moment. Plus ça change

So yes, this is bad. And yes, I think some version of this fuckery will happen again and again, up to and including “well-regarded” fansites mocking and brigading those who point out problems as they’re developing. It won’t stop until SFF publishing and fandom put a stop to it, but herding those cats–especially if there’s money to be made and egos to be massaged–may well prove impossible.

The real horror here is that Chinese SFF authors, publishers, and fans had a brief shining moment of hope which was relentlessly stamped out by the arrogance and collusion of people in charge of the Hugos and their ringleader, a breathtakingly egoistic, bigoted, and contemptuous white dude. The damage extends far and wide, and will no doubt be forgotten by Western SFF publishing and fandom by the time the next shiny spaceship awards are handed out.

plus ce même chose.

I mourn for all the stories and fandom deliciousness we’re missing out on because this shit keeps happening. Things could be so very different, yet they are not. There might indeed be an arc bending towards justice, but damned if I can see it.

Anyway, I need more coffee and Boxnoggin wants his walkies. After that it’s back to writing. I have the great good fortune to continue making my books, at least for the moment, and I’d best use it to the hilt.

Let Thursday begin.

Practice in Patience

A while ago I added user-agent blocking to my site’s firewall in order to discourage “AI” content theft. Since I did so, there have been nearly 3k separate attempts by ChatGPT to steal from my site for their plagiarism machine, and a few hundred on the part of other theft machines. (Last year Neil Clarke put up this wonderfully informative post about protecting one’s website, and I regularly check for new user agents with a DuckDuckGo search.)

Of course, nasty little theft apologist shitheads will sniff that my blog is public, and if I didn’t want the content to be used I shouldn’t have put it here. I’m not even going to dignify that red, goalpost-moving herring with a response.

Anyway. In publishing news (so far as that goes), shifting my self-pub works to distribute at Kobo through Draft2Digital instead of directly has shown an appreciable bump in sales even in the few weeks since the change started. Part of this can be explained by a sharp swift poke making the algorithm notice something it had grown used to ignoring, and another component is D2D automagically rounding territorial prices to .49 and .99, which Kobo prioritises on the down-low but doesn’t give authors the tools to do without spending a lot of time fiddling around. The time investment in keeping track of exchange rates and going back every few months to tweak territorial prices–when I have direct evidence it can be done by a platform itself without fuss–is just too much, especially for an author who has a significant number of titles.

So I’ve been pleased by the results of the change, though I really, really wanted to list directly at Kobo–I am fond of keeping eggs in different baskets, as we all know–and gave them multiple years and chances to shape up. And please remember my experience may not be representative, I know other authors (mostly Canadian) who have wildly different benchmarks and success rates. Publishing is not a one-size-fits-all game.

Most of yesterday was taken up with administrivia like contract stuff, cleanup, formatting, and editor correspondence. It needed to be done and I’d had a couple good working days beforehand, so I’m not too behind the pitch. But I’d rather’ve been writing, as always. The first pitched battle in Highlands War (today’s subscription drop will see the beginning of the second season) needs tying up with the aftermath scene(s), the Sekrit Projekt is going to burn a king’s body, and the novella is airborne but needs another goose or two on the throttle to achieve cruising altitude.

And Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!

Before all that, though, Boxnoggin is craving toast scraps and walkies. He forgot the Icepocalypse and having to basically stay indoors for a week less than 24hrs after the melt had progressed enough we could make it around the block, but still senses something is Not Quite Right and must do an awful lot of sniffing and christening every. single. bush. and. corner to make up for the enforced vacation. Being still caddywumpus from the entire thing myself, both because of the weather and entirely unrelated stress (I did feel like the world was mirroring my inner state for a while, yes indeedy), I understand…but I still wish he’d get a move on sometimes.

Ah well, it’s good practice in patience. I have never regarded myself as a patient being, though the kids say otherwise; the most I can say is that I have deliberately arranged my life to lengthen my fuse in some areas. While that’s great, it also seems to grant a shorter fuse in others, though at least I tend to disengage with a vengeance before I hit that point.

Small mercies, and now I must embark upon the rest of Thursday. At least it looks like a raw, grey, rainy day outside–my favourite kind. And the amount of work looming will keep me off the streets and out of trouble, just as soon as walkies and a run are dealt with.

Excelsior, and all that…

Indignant Fire, Biting Back

I waxed rather indignant this past weekend, so my mentions are a bit of a mess. Reports of the deaths of books and writing are always highly exaggerated, world without end, amen. The recent successes by creatives and people doing the damn work pushing back against corporate and billionaire exploitation has the corps and billionaires running scared that a few of their profit percentage points might get shaved off. I’ll leave it at that.

The current reading is Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America, which is thought-provoking and very dense. I have a couple more of his books (someone got their dear old Mum a gift card recently) added to the TBR pile, which is teetering at a dangerous angle. The Muse wants nice chewy historical reading but she also wants a very specific type of action movie, and I cannot bifurcate like I used to. So maybe it’ll be movie weekends and wading through footnotes the rest of the time.

I woke up with a very specific Pink Floyd in my head; it’s past the winter solstice so maybe I could even listen to it outside the skull radio. However, it doesn’t feel like there’s enough sunlight. I mean, I live in the Pacific Northwest and am glad that it’s nearly always grey, but I can’t listen to the Floyd without some solar radiation. Maybe if there’s a yard work or burn day soon.

Speaking of which, we do have to lug out the firepit before the spring rains halt, mostly because there are Experiments in Combustion to be done. A while ago my writing partner and I were talking about wintergreen LifeSavers making a spark when you bite them (they do!) and the comments on a video we dug up led us to wonder about granulated coffee creamer as firestarting material. Initial experimentation says not really, it has to be airborne before one gets the very theatrical puff of flame. Though in fact, we only tried with a certain kind and it could have been sugar interfering with the effect.

I really should have found a place to get sample packets, then done testing for different flame capabilities, but there was only one certain kind we could get our hands on at short notice so we made do. It’ll just mean more fun later. I want to see if different flavors produce different colors as well; the Selkie doesn’t think so since that’s mostly a function of minerals. But we’ll see. (Science!)

That’s another reason writers will never go out of style. One of our hallmarks is endless curiosity about the world, and willingness to do “research” even if it might singe one’s eyebrows.

However, lighting things on fire will sadly have to wait for a little bit, as I’m up to said eyebrows in work. I want to get this first pitched battle put to bed, get another character agreeing to something despite her better instincts, and then there’s the robot donkey (named Chicken) in the novella to get upright and working–I was about to type manageable but that’s never going to happen. Plus Boxnoggin wants a long ramble and there’s my own silly corpse to move along at a shamble for a defined distance.

And there’s mounting nerves over the upcoming release to deal with as well. All in all, Monday’s biting early and I should get my molars involved in biting back.

…I just popped over into email in order to clear some correspondence that had to go out before 9am, so the week is beginning as it means to go on, I guess. Time to choke down some toast and get out the door.

Ice Glass Globe

Rough ice, smooth heart.

This is a glass gazing globe in the garden (try saying that quickly ten times) and normally it’s completely smooth. The texture you see is from a few hours’ worth of freezing rain a few days ago. The sight was so arresting I had to stop, Boxnoggin investigating one of the deck’s iced-over support struts, and take a snap before going back to pleading with him to please just pee, it’s very cold out here and I’m worried for your paws.

We were supposed to be melted by now…but that hasn’t happened. The street was a solid sheet of ice with liquid water running over it at several points yesterday, then the temperature went back down and the rain turned back into–you guessed it–freezing rain. Boxnoggin hasn’t had walkies in a few days; we’ve made do with many circuits of the yard, trying to break the ice-crust and gain traction on snow underneath, and a whole lot of playing indoors with his many and various dog toys. On the bright side he’s finally figured out one of the easy canine puzzles left over from Bailey’s tenure. It took her five minutes, he’s been working on the damn thing for months. To be fair we never let him struggle for very long, patiently showing him how it works and waiting for a spark to bridge the gap. We’re ever so proud he’s finally grasped it.

The past two weeks have been sort of awful, to the point of losing weight from stress. At least it stopped before the hair-falling-out portion of festivities, though I suspect I may have acquired a few more grey strands. At least I have the consolation of knowing I’m not the problem; being able to go to trusted friends for a quiet word and hearing, “No, you’re right, this is fucked up and you’re being gaslit” is damn near priceless. For the record, these are the same people with carte blanche and encouragement to smack me right in the kisser should I ever Actually Be the Problem, so it’s nice to know that I remain unsmacked.

I may do a sort of self-publishing roundup next week, since I have hit my limit dealing with a couple corporations’ bullshit, but we’ll see. At the moment I just want all this to be handled so I can get back to work. Significant progress has been made–amazingly, once I stop taking any shit at all, many institutions which have been serving said faeces discover that they are in fact capable of acting otherwise in my direction. Funny how that works.

I’ll leave more Chaucer for next week as well, though I am now in the Pardoner’s Tale. I suspect I have acquired momentum and will be finished with ol’ Geoffrey soon. It’s been a marvellous ride.

See you next week!

No More Tied Hands

A very long time ago, I ran across this article by Jenny Crusie, about taking out the garbage and protecting the work. Since then, the phrase “Protect the Work” has been knocking around in my head, on various Post-its stuck to several different laptops and desktops, and is a truth I return to over and over again.

Toxic person throwing a tantrum? Protect the work. Publisher starts behaving nonsensically? Protect the work. Distribution platform enshittifying? Protect the work. Bad-faith reviews, trollery, reviewbombing? Protect the work. Online ruckus? Protect the fucking work.

The fact remains that nobody will protect your books if you do not. Publishing, especially trad, is a business full of exploitation, arcane holdovers from a literal century or two ago, grifting, greed, and ego. Prioritizing your own work, your own health, and your own time is crucial to any sort of success or longevity in the field.

I will be the first to admit that I have let my caretaking instincts and my willingness to bend drive me to deprioritizing my own time, health, and effort to a distinct fault, especially over the last few years with A Certain Series. My commitment to the work itself has never wavered, and at least I can rest assured that I have only very rarely allowed what I knew was best for my own work to be overruled. (My mistakes in that area can be counted on one hand, fortunately.) Yet having to go into battle for my books with one hand tied behind my back has had increasingly deleterious effects on my physical health, and that has been my biggest mistake.

Each time I have finished a fight, I’ve come back to the simple, stark phrase, Protect the work. It’s taken almost two decades in the biz for me to reach the point of snapping, and there will be no more tied hands in battle. Nor will I feel bad about what’s necessary to advocate for my work or my own interests. Our society would prefer women not to do that, publishing would prefer writers not to do that, and exploiters as a whole will use every trick in the book to make you feel bad advocating for yourself, to undercut your confidence so you’re more easily taken advantage of. Perhaps it’s a function of age that I find myself singularly unwilling to entertain that folderol any longer.

Along with this, how I spend my daily time is changing. I can’t be as accessible for certain things during working hours, and I have got to find a way not to feel guilty over the fact. That will be the next life skill I work on.

I’ve once again put PROTECT THE WORK on a Post-it, and stuck it to the desktop. I’ll apply the reminder as many times as it takes.


Moving on! The Chaucer read continues apace. I’m in the weeds of the Merchant’s Tale now, and my loathing of January (who has married poor May) knows very few bounds. I can’t quite tell where the story is heading, and I think it’s marvelous that so much of this corpus hinges on the Wife of Bath’s Tale. It seems like she decided to talk about what she felt was the problem with the Knight’s Tale–indeed, with every tale before she got her chance to speak–and now everyone is reacting to her. She’s driving the entire damn bus, not the Host and certainly not Chaucer himself. The more this goes on, the more I find her the meta-character at the heart of the entire endeavour, and this pleases me even if I sometimes felt she was being a bit long-winded. Of course her culture rarely gave women the chance to speak, and she’s forced to do so through a male writer, so…maybe she had reason to yell while she had the mic.

Seeing the traces of paganism (filtered through Roman versions of Greek classics) throbbing under the constant hum of medieval Catholicism is interesting as well. Plus there are former versions of sayings we use to this day, trapped in amber, smiling like old friends. Now that I have the rhythm of the language–it really is like Shakespeare, teaching one to read it as one goes along–everything is much, much easier.

In fact, I couldn’t wait to get back to it this morning, and stole a little time in bed with Boxnoggin snoring next to me, breathlessly reading Hades and Persephone beginning to argue about January, May, Damian, and the whole situation. I can’t wait for Persephone to bonk her husband on the head and point out he’s certainly no paragon of marital behavior.

And my scheduled time for blogging is over. It’s a wet, icy mess out there, “slicker than gooseshit” as some of the locals say, and the dog might not get the walk he wants unless we set out after more of the hazardous ice-sheets have washed away. But the back of the freeze is broken and it’s disintegrating bit by bit.

Hopefully that’s a sign. Onward to Thursday.

Year of the Real

I don’t often blog on Wednesdays, keeping those mornings for other things instead. But this week is a little different. My health is not good, we are literally iced in1, and I have been thinking about a few things.

One of them is my Word of the Year. Resolutions bear mixed results at best, not least for the self-punishment our culture encourages if a new habit isn’t easily and flawlessly acquired. So, somewhere around the internets, I saw someone had simply picked a few words to focus on for the year instead, and that seemed a grand idea.

January 1, I decided I would focus on one word, and I would keep it simple.

The word was REAL.

We are assailed by “AI” plagiarism pap–visual, audio, and textual–as well as disinformation and propaganda, to a degree unusual in my life experience. Of course disinformation and propaganda have been with us from the beginning, especially as humanity developed mass-communication tools.2 However, I feel like it’s currently heaped up, doused with jet fuel, and set ablaze, with lots of people merrily shoveling more highly volatile fuel onto the blaze just to see what happens.3

Not only that, but I work in publishing. It’s not quite Hollywood, where one is well advised not to believe even the simplest assertion until the cheque clears (not deposited, clears) but it’s still an industry largely built on the exploitation of creative people, and that exploitation requires broken promises, implicit deceit, outright lies, and shameless number-juggling to a degree that astonishes many folks, even those in other lines of work where such things are rampant.4

I cannot fix this. And I know there are a lot of people out there claiming to be writers when in fact they are marketers and view the actual writing as a chore best farmed out to ghostwriters, who are forced to scour Upwork and Fiverr for a pittance in order to barely pay ever-escalating rent. There are a lot of people claiming to be writers when in fact they are grifters attempting to score big with LLM plagiarism, running away with the cash before they can be brought to account. There are a lot of people claiming to be “publishing gurus” or “coaches” when in fact they are also grifters looking to profit off the desperation of those who think they could be a Big-Name Novelist if they could just find the Magic Handshake. There’s a whole host of people claiming to be artists in when in fact they are plagiarizing, thieving pieces of shit who think a Midjourney prompt is something that should put them on Rembrandt’s level.

These people are fakes. I prefer to be real.

I have been considered a bit temperamental because I want my books a certain way.5 I want my books to be as good and as honest as I can make them, and while I allow feedback from trusted sources the final decision is always mine. I have sometimes insisted on that to the point of open conflict, and I know I have passed up and lost certain opportunities as a result.

The few times I have allowed myself to be overridden by the well-meaning (or the vengeful), I have always regretted it.

I think readers respond to both hard work in and the reality of books. I don’t think readers only want plagiarised pap or bland, anodyne inoffensive mealymouthing. I think even if a book or an author is flawed, if they are honest about their experience, refuse to bullshit, and put in the work, readers will respond. I think human beings are capable of discerning the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of tiny signals in a work of human art that say, “I made this with my whole being, and I give it to you.” Even if people dislike the piece of art in question, the emotional response is still there.6

I’m betting that people still want complex, nuanced, juicy books that take significant effort to write.7 Regardless of whether I win or lose the bet, I do not regret placing it and will never stop believing it’s the right call.

Concurrently, I am done with being shamed when I am “difficult” because a book has a complex plot or words that may require a dictionary trip, “unlikeable” characters or a non-happy ending. I will not betray the work. I will not, in any way, betray the Real.

That’s what I’m focusing on this year. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen such a word after years of pandemic and escalating fakeness.8 I know the power of words–how on earth could I not? And the first challenge in my Year of the Real has been a doozy, possibly permanently damaging my health and driving me past patience.

But I’ve taken up the gauntlet. I have often said, especially since 2016, that I dislike hope because it just leads to getting kicked in the face again. Yet Hope is not a shrinking violet. She has been knocked to the ground, spat out a few teeth, blinked away the blood, reached for her shattered sword, and the bitch just keeps getting back up. Hope is the sister of the Real, and so long as I am faithful to them–so long as I do not truckle–they will return the favor.

Let’s see what the year throws at me next.