I just had an email from David Hartwell, requesting permission to reprint “The Consciousness Problem” in The Years Best Science Fiction #15, to be published in the spring as a mass market paperback original by Harper Eos.
Naturally, I said yes.
And then jumped up and down in the hotel room for a bit wishing I had someone to squee with.
Remember how excited I was when Shades of Milk and Honey became available for pre-order on Amazon.com? It no longer is.
Why can’t you pre-order my book on Amazon.com?
Because on Friday, amazon.com stopped carrying all the Macmillan books. My publisher, Tor is an imprint of Macmillan. You can still buy some through third parties on Amazon.com, but no new books, which means you won’t be able to buy Shades of Milk and Honey there.
How did this happen?
According to Macmillan CEO John Sargent:
This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.
Basically, Macmillan wanted to be able to control their pricing of e-books and offer them in a dynamic price range from $14.99 to $5.99. Amazon wants to cap e-book prices at $9.99.
Now, Amazon is perfectly within their rights as a company to decide what they will and won’t stock.
I also have the right to decide where I send my website traffic, so I’m swapping out all the links to books to point at Powell’s Books, which is after all, my local independent book store. Meanwhile, I also changed my author bio on amazon.com to explain why you can’t buy my book there.
For fuller analysis of the situation, I recommend the following links:
Tobias’s Buckell’s “Why My Books Are No Longer Available on Amazon.com”
Charlie Stross’ “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight”
Edited to add: You can pre-order Shades of Milk and Honey from Borders!
Hey! My latest column is up at AMC and I take a look at the “elderly” in fantasy film.
My sense of what it means to be elderly is wildly skewed since my grandmother will be 105 next week, is sharp as a tack and still lives on her own. Sadly, fantasy has a narrower view of the elderly, and they get short shrift when it comes to adventuring. Fantasy ageism posits that old people have either had their turn, or exist to support the youth who are really getting things done. Thus, if you have gray hair in a fantasy flick, you probably fall into one of three camps.
Read Call the AARP! Middle Earth’s Ageism Needs an Intervention – SciFi Scanner – AMC.
One of the reasons I was cast to do the novel I’m reading right now is because I grew up in North Carolina. Of course, the story is set in South Carolina so I have the wrong accent.
Yes. Yes, there is more than one Southern accent.
To complicate matters, my parents are from East Tennessee which is entirely different from either of the Carolinas AND I was surrounded by folks transplanted to the Research Triangle Park so while I can sound authentically Southern, it’s a weird hybrid. To someone from South Carolina it won’t sound fake, but it’ll sound like I’m from some other part of the South. Because I am.
I also had little to no accent growing up which we blame on two things, the abundance of transplants in Raleigh and a speech impediment when I was little.
See a sizable part of southern accents is the dropped R. I couldn’t pronounce the letter at all and had it trained into me when I was little. But there are things that betray my regional origin. Words that, because I don’t have an accent, sound like I’m just mispronouncing them.
Two of them, I learned when I was reading A Local Habitation. I’ve said “unfortunately” and “definitely” wrong my entire life. Since I’m using a southern accent for this other book, I called home to find out how my folks pronounced those two words.
The same way I do, which means it is a regional variation.
I’ve always said “unfortunantly” and “definently.” Which explains why I’ve never been able to spell either word… It also means that I should switch pronunciations depending on if I’m reading the narrator or a character. That should be fun.
Accents… they fascinate me.
I’ll be in Grand Rapids Haven until February 6th, recording more audio books for Brilliance Audio. I’m narrating Home in Carolina (Sweet Magnolias)
Edited to add: Um. I’m actually in Grand Haven. I flew into Grand Rapids.
I meant to post this a week ago, but it remains funny so nothing is lost. If you do not already follow Dr. Eldritch, you really should. However, this particular issue might be my favorite. For obvious reasons. Here’s the start of this storyline, but you should read the whole thing.
I know exactly how Mr. Puppeteer feels. In fact, there are parts of this conversation that could be a direct transcription of my life.
I’ve been sitting on this for a bit, but I’ll be joining the team at Weird Tales as their art director. Clearly, this is very exciting. I’ve long been an admirer of the work that Stephen Segal has done to revitalize the magazine and look forward to continuing his work.
Of course the rest of the staff is made of awesome. A chance to work with Ann VanderMeer and Paula Guran on the world’s oldest fantasy magazine? Heck, yes. I’ll take that, thank you.
If you’d like to read the full press release, step over to Weird Tales
Today, I turned in my platform to run for the vice president of SFWA. I’m running with a slate of other candidates that include:
Here is the letter I posted in the 2010 Election area on the SFWA discussion forums. Continue reading I’m running for Vice President of SFWA
I started the day by biking down to Voodoo donuts to meet Cat and Mr. Rambo for, well, donuts. Powered by sugar, I came home to spend more time with our stove.
Which means it’s time for before and after pictures of stove! We’ll not the whole stove, but just the under the hood part. This is what it looked like with all the burners pulled out.
And this is what it looks like, after cleaning. I think we can probably get the last little bits of rust off the enamel, but largely I’m pleased by how well this part has cleaned up.
Most of today has been alternating between scrubbing things and attacking the grease trap for the griddle with a wire brush and my dremel tool. It has serious rust, although as I clean it off, it sort of looks like it might be grease with a dusting of rust on top, because the metal underneath is in good shape. Rob has been dealing with the mechanics and working on the regulators and such.
This week Rob and I bought a vintage O’Keefe-Merritt stove to replace the one in our apartment. After years of cooking on the Wedgewood at our house, I’ve been thoroughly spoiled. So we got permission to change stoves and have been idly scanning Craigslist looking for a new one.
Behold! Four burners, a griddle, oven, warming oven and a broiler. It is a thing of beauty. The chrome and porcelain are in great shape and it just needs a little cleaning to be ready to go. We aren’t sure the year and model of this one. The closest I can find is the 1954 model 405.
I think the fellow who was selling it was a little taken aback when we bought it because the first thing we did was disassemble it as far as we could. These things are really heavy and if you pull out the burners and such the stove becomes manageable. It felt a little like being an auto-team which is enhanced because the interior looks very much like it is made of engine parts.
This is our project for the next week. I’ll post photos as we go.
I have a 5600 word fantasy story that I’d love to have some readers for. If you have time to give a read and offer feedback, please drop me a line and ask for the password.
The teaser:
A Piece of Valiant Dust
Harloyd walked through Loveman’s department store, swinging his brass thurible from its chain. A fine dust of fern, stream-smoothed stone, willow bark and all the other little things that made up a chilling spell fell from the tiny holes in the cone and drifted to form patterns of cool in the air.
His dark blue uniform, with its double row of shiny brass buttons and neat brimmed cap, marked him as Loveman’s heating and cooling magicker. As he went, the patrons smiled gratefully at him for keeping the venerable building comfortable. Sure, lots of folks bought ready-made cooling powders for their homes, but the temperature always fluctuated as the dust settled out. Only Loveman’s had heating and cooling men working to keep an even temperature, so folks tended to come in to shop more than at other stores.
It had gotten so Harloyd couldn’t walk to catch the streetcar home from downtown Chattanooga without someone tipping their hat to him and saying, “Evening, Mr. Varnell.” Some days he felt like everybody in town knew him. His wife joked that he should go into politics.
His rounds took him onto the ladies’ floor, where gleaming cases of walnut and glass held the latest in jewelry and cosmetics. His wife, Addie, worked in the evening wear section helping the most notable society ladies find the right dress for whatever event they needed. She was with one of her regulars, young Miss Priest. Harloyd just tipped his head at the ladies and kept walking with his thurible. While it made him proud to see Addie working here, there was always that worry that her powder might wear off while she wasn’t paying attention. Loveman’s didn’t let the colored in. Not that Addie had more than a touch of the paintbrush, but there was no telling what they’d do to her. Him either, since mixed marriages were a illegal in Tennessee. For all that, the day she’d come into his life, looking for a spell to help her pass had been the best thing that had ever happened to him.
I was working on a project today that required me to say how many short stories I’ve sold. The answer is 30. I’m sort of staggered. That’s a lot of stories.
Meanwhile, I realized that I badly needed to update my bibliography, which has been ignored since my bilbiofly plugin broke. I kept hoping that there would be an update, but alas, no.
This led to two further realizations.
Clearly, I need to consider my next titles carefully.
Just a reminder, or a head’s up for those who don’t know, the official Campbell site is displaying all the eligible authors that they know about. The key here is the phrase “that they know about.”
If your first pro-sale has appeared in print in 2008 or 2009, make sure you contact them to get included on the list of Campbell eligible authors.
My dad called me today to tell me that he had spent some time with my grandmother and had taken Scenting the Dark with him. We talked about the three stories he read today and it was interesting because he read drafts of the first and third but I guess never got to see the finals.
One of the things I found interesting was that on “Some Other Day” he said that the first time he read it he focused on the mosquitos and that this time he focused on the love story. The difference? I’m fairly certain I didn’t add a word. But I rearranged them. In the draft Dad read, I started with what is now the second scene in the story. It was really hard to decide to move it because it has one of the best opening lines.
“The summer the mosquitoes died began as the best one in Josie Landon’s childhood.”
I hated losing that opening line, but as my Dad has noticed, it puts all the emphasis on the mosquitoes. The published opening is “Josie Langdon leaned back from her microscope and rolled her neck to ease the kinks.”
While this opening line isn’t as attention grabbing, it sets the scene, tells you that she’s been at it a while and that she’s some sort of scientist. Two lines later I introduce the boy and this puts the emphasis on the love story by making it the first source of conflict I introduce. All by flopping the first and second scenes.
This is an example of fixing the ending of a story by changing the beginning and I’d totally forgotten that I’d done that until Dad called today. Pretty cool, huh?
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