The Blue Candle Society

I like to poke a bit of good-natured fun at Amazon, for doing things like being all jerky and offering coupons for people who scan items in someone else’s store, the buying it from Amazon, or for yanking books by people arguing with, or trying to patent reselling used electrons.  I mainly do it because Amazon is such an enormous, fat, juicy target, of course.

But lately, between hiring folks with neo-nazi ties to keep German warehouse workers in line, and trying to gain control of the very “.book” domain itself, I think it is pretty clear that Jeff Bezos is just funnin’ us all.  Which makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose.  If you’ve got a massive organization bordering on monopsony that is somehow still not actually making any money, what else could it be for but a whacky joke machine?

Either that, or it is simply there to create the resources that can be used to track down historic rocket engines.

Posted in Uncategorized

It may be immediately obvious that this article has anything to do with writing, but as everyone knows, a writer writes, always.  And that includes aboard aircraft, on long, boring flights.  And of course, it is impossible to do that when the person in the seat in front of you reclines their seat, whether you use a laptop or write things out longhand.

Posted in General writing things

From Tim Pratt and his twitter followers comes this list of Hugo award categories that ought to be.  Personally, my favorite is “Best Novel By A Writer Who Really Should Have Won For That Other Novel They Published Twenty Years Ago So Here” – it would really make sense to make that its own category so they wouldn’t need to force some other novel into it on the downlow.

Posted in General writing things

All writers are used to rejection (either that or they are dangerously off-balance, sitting in their garrets and muttering about all the people who don’t understand their genius).  But I’ve noticed something interesting, lately.  Out of all the writers I know who have a fair number of short stories out on the street at the same time (let’s say half a dozen), all of us have had multiple days with two or even three rejections coming within hours of each other.

Clearly, this seems a bit improbable.  If we use round numbers, someone with 6 short stories out under submission could expect a roughly 1.7% chance of getting a rejection on any given day (assuming that editors work weekends, which evidence certainly suggests they do).  So, if my math is right, that means about a 0.0004% chance of getting three in one day.  Now I could believe that happening, but this has happened to 100% of my sample, remember, multiple times in some cases.

Clearly, this isn’t just happenstance.  My original theory was that the editors of publications gathered in bars (with names like The Red Pen, and The Dangling Participle – you know, editor’s bars) every few months, where they’d have rejection parties (other than Shimmer—badgers don’t drink).  They’d save up all their reading for these parties, under this theory, rejecting dozens or hundred of stories in a single night, fueled by beer and chicken wings (Scotch, you say?  No, that would be agents and book editor types).  Naturally, you’d expect clusters of rejections under that system.

But I realized that while many of us seem to experience these triple rejection days, none of us seem to have them on the same day.  That kind of messes up my rejection party theory, so I have a new one. Now I’m pretty sure that the editors of magazines simply store up their rejections as they happen, and coordinate with one another so as to send out as many to the same person on the same day as possible.  So it is sort of like that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the women writing letters of condolence realize with mounting horror that one mother is about to get three letters.  Except in this case that’s the sweet spot they’re aiming for.  Why would they do this, you ask?  I’m guessing that it is to break the spirit of as many writers as possible, so they give up and become editors.

Posted in General writing things

As frequent readers know, I do make an effort to point folks towards progressively more awesome things.  Thanks to Comedy Central’s tight hold on their material, this latest awesome thing isn’t easy to just throw on a blog, but it is worth a bit of work to see what happened when James Franco challenged Stephen Colbert to a Tolkien trivia contest.

Posted in General writing things

I’ve often argued that the market for fiction is kind of skewed, as markets go, by the number of people willing to write for nothing or close to it.  This not only makes it difficult to break into the writing game, it can make life interesting for editors and the like.  Imagine what life would be like if other fields were like this–if you could put the word out that you needed a plumber and 200 people would show up willing to fix your pipes for a pittance, only you had no way of knowing which ones knew anything about plumbing.

It is possible this has something to do with the amazing fame available to a published author making up for the fact that a solid pro-market short story will pay about fourteen cents an hour once you factor in time for rewrites and all.  But a more common explanation is that writers do it for the sheer love of creating stories.  I’ve often heard that one shouldn’t try to be a writer unless you’d be willing to do it for free (good advice, since that is exactly what you’ll most likely be doing, but again, it makes for an odd market).

So what are we to make of studies that show that when you pay someone for their hobby, they lose interest?

The way I see it, there are three possibilities:

1. Writers who fall into the middle ground of being paid, but not actually making a living at writing tend to quit, so the only ones sticking around are either not publishing yet or are very successful (I don’t buy this, given how many mid-list authors there are running around with day jobs)

2. Writers are paid so little, on average, that they don’t really notice that someone is paying them (not sure I buy this either, given how hard writers strive to get paid, but I suppose some might consider it more of a system of scoring than money, per se).

3. Writers are magnificent weirdos whose brains don’t work like other people’s, and are thus immune to the mundane considerations that motivate normal people.

I like (3), myself.

Posted in General writing things

For the latest installment in my series of griping about people mis-using cliches, I thought I’d tackle square one versus ground zero.

Now, obviously, square one is where you start.  Everyone knows this, but irritatingly, no one knows why (I actually thought it had something to do with chess, though now that I stop and think about it, I can’t imagine why).  It seems to me, we should borrow a page from land surveying, and just go with good old POB (Point Of Beginning).

Ground zero, on the other hand, is not where something starts, it is where something explodes.  So in a sense, it is an end point, not a start point.  But even 9/11 has not stopped people from conflating it with square one.  I’d sort of gotten used to this, until the other night when I heard someone use both phrases to mean the same thing in the space of thirty seconds.  That just won’t stand.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

As longtime readers know, I’m always interested in efforts to quantify the messy business of writing, and to establish as many data points as possible.  This graphic, from nextmovie.com, is concerned with movies (obviously), but for the most part we’re talking about things that were books first. As usual with this sort of thing, you can tell as much from the differences as the similarities.

Is it more interesting, for example, that all of these heroines are white and mainly have poor self esteem, or is the wider spread in the number of siblings and parents they have a more intriguing point?  It is tempting, of course, to ascribe the similarities to the authors (I think, at least as far as the books go, that all these authors are white, and we can probably assume they are all shy, with low self-esteem, they being writers and all).

Plain old marketability probably has a lot to do with it, though.  I’m guessing, after all, that half the authors weren’t raised by single parents in small towns (then again, if those traits are marketable in a main character, they most be only sort of marketable since so many authors don’t bother).

The real question, assuming the traits of YA heroines has a lot to do with marketing, is, is all that similarity really necessary, or is there an audience out there clamoring for a more diverse band of heroes?  Or, for that matter, is this chart full of cherry-picked data?  Perhaps someone more versed in the YA scene can point out a boisterous, confident, red-headed YA heroine.

Oh, hang on, how about Merida?  Shoot, not a book.  Never mind.

Posted in General writing things

Usually, of course, grammar disputes just result in grumpy people getting their knickers in a twist over something unimportant, but from the Onion comes this story of the true tragedy that can result when these sorts of disagreements get out of hand.

So, clearly, everyone should just settle down and not get worked up over grammar.  Except about the Oxford comma, of course – that’s important, as my parents, Ayn Rand and God will attest.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

I’m currently on the third book of a science fiction trilogy that has started to drag a bit for me, because we’re in a section involving military battles and things keep happening that make no damn sense.  It is sci-fi, and not hard scie-fi, so to an extent one can get away with a hand wave and a muttering about “advanced technology”, but at some point internal consistency breaks down and there just seems to be no reason for the various antagonists in the war to do what they’re doing.

So I was interested to read this breakdown of the various tactical and strategic errors in the Battle of Hoth.  I admit I’d never thought of these problems before (Han Solo bragging about making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs had always bugged me, since that is a unit of distance, but the Empire Strikes Back always seemed a bit more internally consistent).  But all authors should take this as a cautionary tale – if the Empire Strikes Back can be picked apart, what can’t?

Oh, also – if you are riding a tauntaun and find yourself in danger of freezing, don’t cut it open and crawl inside.  It just won’t work.

Posted in General writing things