Last Month (April)

01 May 2000
M'aidez

I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that I didn't get any reviews done for the reviews page this month. All of the fiction that I finished early enough to get a review done was either short fiction or material for academic presentations. However, vengeance will be mine in May. I already have five strong candidates for Dumpster Diving, including one very high profile lack-of-effort. In fact, one of the books is so bad that its appearance may be delayed until the end of the month . . . for a full-length review (and accompanying environmental impact statement) as toxic waste.

The first day of May carries several connotations. In no particular order (and far from an exhaustive list), we have:

1. A pagan holiday later celebrated in such pagan societies as eighteenth-century England
2. In Europe, and particularly in England, a celebratory holiday for the organised labour movement (and Labour Party)
3. An aircraft pilot's call for help as he realizes that, aeronautically speaking, he's in deep kimchee (hence the title of today's entry)
4. In the United States, a little-known moment for professional reflection—Law Day

Items two and four are particularly interesting. During most of the history of "trade unions" and similar organizations, the law frowned upon collective action by laborers (or employees of any kind). For example, the most common use of the Sherman and Clayton Acts (antitrust) in this nation during their first few years was busting unions, not monopolistic and oligopolistic businesses. Congress had to step in with the Labor Management Relations Act to put a stop to that. The law often does little to punish unfair employer tactics (or, for that matter, unfair union tactics), turning a blind eye to the reality of intimidation that resembles both the Cold War and the screaming tribes of hominids at the beginning of 2001.

Some of the conflict comes because not just the actual propertied classes, but the wannabe propertied bourgeosie has historically believed that unions are just a bunch of Commie crap that will undermine our strength, our moral fiber, and the purity of our precious bodily fluids. I've always been fond of the "weak link in the chain" theory of social development—that, when placed under external stress, a society is no stronger than its weakest cognizable class of members. So keeping Appalachian coal miners in poverty gets you the 1960s.

Of course, unions aren't always good. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. It pains me to remind you that the first rule in our kind of business is to avoid getting caught, or at least convicted. You've always been a big football fan, haven't you? I think you'll appreciate the special endzone accomodations I've arranged for all Giants home games. Michael, please take Mr. Hoffa for a little ride to the Meadowlands. This is particularly true when the union leadership is paid as well as, or better than, executives of many small and mid-sized businesses who must negotiate with the unions. Can anyone say "Uncle Tom"? For, in reality, this is how the union leadership itself becomes part of the propertied class. That they're stealing opportunities from their members doesn't seem to bother them.

All of which is to say that unionizing writers would be sort of like herding cats—without the possibility of as much success. The writers who could be influential aren't, because it's not in their economic or artistic interest to so act. The labor-type writer's organizations that do exist are so wound up in their little turf wars and first-grade temper tantrums that they screw up things more than they help. For example, consider Tasini. Yes, it's great that the individual members of the NWU stepped forward and had the NWU pay for the suit. But why, oh why, didn't they consult attorneys who knew how to handle complex litigation and intellectual property at the pre-filing stage? Their failure to handle it as a class action (and certification is a slam dunk) means that every other writer in a similar situation must now file suit for him or herself to recover. It's too late now (Fed. R. Civ. P. 23, 56). And so on.

05 May 2000
Exactly Half

The King
           . . . mend your speech a little,
     Lest it may mar your fortunes.

The Princess
     Good my lord,
     You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
     Return those duties back as are right fit,
     Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
     Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
     They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
     That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
     Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
     Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
     To love my father all.

The King
     But goes thy heart with this?

The Princess
     Ay, good my lord.

The King
     So young, and so untender?

The Princess
     So young, my lord, and true.

The King
     Let it be so; thy truth, then, be thy dower:
     For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
     The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
     By all the operation of the orbs
     From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
     Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
     Propinquity and property of blood,
     And as a stranger to my heart and me
     Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
     Or he that makes his generation messes
     To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
     Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved,
     As thou my sometime daughter.

Shakespeare's words apply equally to writers with day jobs. We are equally torn between two things to which we've pledged out loyalty: our muse and our economic sustenance. The muse, though, is often rather more demanding than we can handle. So, for that matter, is the day job. Satisfying both the muse and the day job is not as easy as merely dividing one's time exactly between them—say, work from 10AM to 6PM and write from 7PM to 11PM. At times, one or the other will expand to swallow part or all of the other's time—and each is a jealous master or mistress. Sometimes getting the day job done right requires lots and lots of overtime, sometimes for an extended period of time. Sometimes attending conventions—oops, conferences—and doing necessary research requires work during normal business hours. Then there are family life, silly errands like grocery shopping, and so on.

We all remember what happened when Cordelia tried rigid divisions, don't we?

There's also a subtler issue. Too often, we treat our writing—and, for that matter, our day jobs and families—as entitlements; something that we inherit merely because we are who we are, and perhaps because of whom our parents are or were. Perhaps Cordelia's problem was as much that she didn't work at satisfying both masters, because her day job (or is it her muse?) would be hers by devise. We've all heard of the profligate scion of old money, and of the talentless descendant of great artists. Is there, perhaps, more than a coincidental connection here? Does Shakespeare's family history shed any light?

I think I hear my day job calling . . .

07 May 2000
Suburban Terrorism

I'm going to put a contract out for destruction of the Case backhoe plant. I've just had my weekend destroyed by an illiterate suburban terrorist.

A word to the wise, to keep me and my minions from coming after you: don't assume that you can just blithely use a backhoe (overkill anyway) to remove that nasty old stump in the back yard without taking precautions. Simple ones, like calling to have the f*(&)!$%^!g utilities marked. If you'd really like to take your life in your hands, though, wait until three or four years after the tree was hacked down (for no good reason), then start your work on a Sunday morning when there's nobody around to help with problems. Check first, though, to ensure that I (or someone like me) have critical file transfers to perform. That should certainly make your day. To really rub it in, live next door to an electrical contractor who has instructions for calling the utilities painted in big, bright letters on the side of his truck.

No, this is not a law-school hypothetical. I wish it was. Instead of a 15-minute upload over a digital line, I'm looking at around 5 hours over a modem. I am not a happy camper. (I am sitting here watching the fun meter get slower, and sloooower, and slooooooooower, as the first of five files uploads. We're down to around 12.4 kbps, and still falling. Maybe five hours is optimistic.) Who is the real suburban terrorist: me, after I take this yob out—or him?

This is turning into Xeno's Upload. Almost literally. No matter how long I've been uploading this file (first of five), there is still the same estimate for time remaining.

For anyone who missed it, CBS Sunday Morning ran a piece on the Society for Creative Anachronism. Hosted, naturally, by Bill Geist. All of a sudden, I'm starting to wonder if downtown Chicago will be safe from these people during Worldcon. And the SCA is usually the saner element . . .

09 May 2000
Todentanz

Ask any experienced major-crimes investigator, or even an experienced major criminal (perhaps someone as lucid as the esteemed Dr. Lector), about the worst—most dangerous and likely to lead to apprehension—moment in a crime. It's almost never the setup, or even the crime itself. It's the getaway—an unjustly neglected aspect of "suspense" novels. Plans for the getaway are usually cursory, or at least secondary to the crime itself. Cursory plans are usually the downfall of the criminal.

Exfiltration is the "death dance." It's sort of the opposite of infiltration—instead of penetrating a guarded target through stealth, it's removing an "asset" from the guarded target through stealth. An "asset" can be something physical, but it's usually a person—sometimes a "spy," more often a source. It's extraordinarily risky, and depends on Murphy taking a vacation. Carefully read the article about the fall of Saigon in the 1 May 2000 issue of Newsweek. Although my batting average in calling the tune to the Todentanz is .750—without the major-league salary, unfortunately—that's not good enough for my conscience. There are times that I wish they had surgically removed it, at least during the bar exam. (That's the real reason the bar exam takes two or three days—the surgeons can only operate so fast.) I would certainly sleep better.

Thus, tomorrow is a black hole.

13 May 2000 posted 15 May Brain Salad Surgery

Well, this is a waste. I'm typing away at my old military-issue 286 "laptop" (it doubles as a barbell, given its titanium Tempest-class case) while HAL (my main computer) tries to reinstall Windows98. Therein lies a tale; a tale of madness, brain surgery, and poor documentation.

Here's a big phhhhhht! for the fine scum at AMI who wrote the documentation for the motherboard in HAL. They claimed that the BIOS is flashable, but it's not (I know the difference between an EPROM and an EEPROM). Thus, the motherboard could not accept the new "brain" (processor chip), because the BIOS couldn't recognize a chip with a clock speed faster than 200mHz. So, I snarlingly put the old processor back in, only to discover that the AMI-provided flash utility had overwritten part—but not all—of the operating system and boot area on the hard disk with copies of itself.

So, after several attempts, I was able to boot from the Windows98SE CD-ROM—only to have it refuse to install the operating system, because it detected enough of the previous installation to negate the criminally inept SETUP program. Thus began a three-hour marathon of chasing down hidden files on the hard disk, deleting them, rebooting to the install disk, trying the install, and discovering yet another set of hidden files that needed to be deleted—from the command line, naturally, requiring another reboot.

But, in the end, it worked. Which is more than I can say for the last time I tried to replace a damaged Mac OS, even with a technician from Apple on the other end of the phone line for two hours before he determined that the only solution was a low-level format of the hard disk.

I suppose this is kind of like the way high school boys in my generation gathered around to hop up another 1970ish vehicle into a real jalopy. No grease on the clothes, and no brute force involved, either.

15 May 2000
Survival of the Unfit

After reinstalling (literally) every piece of software in HAL's brain, I've come to the conclusion that we need to put programs on a strict marathon-runner's regimen. The programs are really fatty, and we need to make them lean mean computin' machines.

The real cause of the problems is excessive reliance on "integration." Remember the dark days of the early- and mid-80s, when "integrated" programs like the buggy monsters from Lotus and Ashton-Tate were going to take over the world? We're doing the same thing all over again. I use different data and different parts of my brain for creating graphics than writing a document. Why, then, should we stuff everything into one program? All that matters is common data interchange formats, and perhaps common interfaces. Putting a full drawing suite inside Word97 and Word2000, for example, is absolutely ridiculous. The overhead for "install when used" systems exceeds the overhead saved by limiting the initial feature set, so that's not a solution, either—especially when some of the features will be used only once or twice.

Why this rant? The speed comparison between my 14-year-old 286-10 laptop (DOS only) and the monstrosity on my desk. WordPerfect 6.1 (DOS) has more features than one can shake a stick at, but runs faster for real writing (even including footnotes) than this desktop monstrosity with around 100 times the processing power. Food for thought for our "friends" in Redmond. Maybe the innovation that the marketplace is really looking for is faster, more reliable performance that doesn't overuse the system's resources.

Not to mention, folks, that WP6.1 actually counts words accurately . . . which Word97 and Word2000 cannot say. See De Silva v. DiLeonardi (7th Cir. 1999) (slip op.).

Hugo ballots are out, for those planning on attending WorldCon. Vote, dammit! Hell, it's in Chicago; at least we could look a little bit like Chicago voters. So, maybe, we'll have a bunch of dead writers voting . . .

I now understand just a little bit why HarperCollins thought it necessary to destroy HarperPrism and replace it in toto with Eos. The latest entry in Dumpster Diving is based on the sixth book in a series which, when laid end to end, shows no danger of ever reaching a conclusion.

18 May 2000
Landshark!

In this month's Locus, Mr. Brown comments that Locus doesn't publish what he calls "killer reviews," because the books for review are chosen by the reviewers. Let's put that last point aside for a moment and look at the first. In polite language, I vehemently disagree with several of the assumptions that it makes.

• It is of dubious service to the readers of the publication. There are so many books published that no group of four regular reviewers could hope to cover much of the field (I'm excluding horror here, primarily because Mr. Bryant's column is no longer monthly). So, do we take silence to mean that the book was bad, or merely below the radar screen, or just had the misfortune to be released the same month as another book that everyone reviewed? Aside: Mr. Wolfe and Ms. Miller have overlapped too much recently; I think there has been a review from each of them on the same book most issues this year. The readers deserve better, as George Orwell pointed out (quoting from a previous journal):

  Various people have suggested that it would be all to the good if no novels were reviewed at all. So it would, but the suggestion is useless, because nothing of the kind is going to happen. No paper which depends on publishers' advertisements can afford to throw them away, and though the more intelligent publishers probably realize that they would be no worse off if the blurb-review were abolished, they cannot put an end to it for the same reasons as the nations cannot disarm—because nobody wants to be the first to start. For a long time yet the blurb-reviews are going to continue, and they are going to grow worse and worse; the only remedy is to contrive in some way that they shall be disregarded. But this can only happen if somewhere or other there is decent novel reviewing which will act as a standard of comparison. That is to say, there is need of just one periodical (one would be enough for a start) which makes a specialty of novel reviewing but refuses to take any notice of tripe, and in which the reviewers are reviewers and not ventriloquists' dummies clapping their jaws when the publisher pulls the string.

  George Orwell. 1936. "In Defense of the Novel." Reprinted in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. I (Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds.). London: Martin, Secker & Warburg, 1968, at 281-88.

  In short, this is an issue of long-term credibility. If we don't know what they don't like (in detail, not just in side comments), how can we trust statements of what they do?

• It is of no service to the field whatsoever. Performance doesn't improve when the only feedback offered comes from cheerleaders, or apathetic fans in the case of lukewarm reviews. That goes for individual authors, for publishers, and for the field as a whole. The deterioration of Heinlein is an excellent example. Virtually everything he wrote after the early 1960s was unmitigated crap—but nobody had the guts to tell him so. That is what Orwell means by "reviewers are reviewers." It may be too much to expect the newly hired editorial assistant to grab the Editorial Director by the lapel and scream "This is awful! Make the author revise it!" That is why reviewers need to do so.
• It mistakenly conflates criticism of a work with criticism of the author. That's not to say that authors' feelings won't be hurt, but Locus is certainly prominent enough to quash the implied excuses. Writing that crushing review can be an educational process for both the reviewer and the author, because a bad review results from a failure to communicate: usually the author's failure, but sometimes the reviewer's failure to understand.

  That is not to say that I believe in ad hominem reviewing like that found in the National Review and New Yorker—far from it. Just as one shouldn't gush because it says "Asimov" somewhere on the cover, one shouldn't trash because it says "Hubbard." This should, in turn, remind you very much of local school censorship battles—and Fahrenheit 451.

• It is of no service to the reviewers themselves. Just as flowers can't grow without some fertilizer, which is an organic waste product whether it is natural or man-made, reviewers can't grow without thinking critically about the literary equivalent of horse manure. One of the reviewers at Locus writes reviews now that are virtually identical to those of a decade ago. Has speculative fiction changed at all in that time?

Returning to the implication that the reviewers select the books they will review, and thus inevitably like them, one must consider the "disappointment factor." As a particular example, look at my review of Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic. I expected, and wanted, to like the book based on the Assassin trilogy and Hobb's writings under her "real" name (Megan Lindholm). Similarly, the concept of L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Spellsong Cycle is interesting enough (to me, anyway) that I wanted to like the books. I didn't. Are Mr. Wolfe, Ms. Miller, and company so perfect in their preconceptions that they never pick out a book for review that they later come to despise? I think not—unless they do indeed judge a book by its cover.

Mr. Brown and company, please reconsider the "no killer reviews" policy. You, the authors, the publishers, and the field just might learn something. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes; it does no one any good to merely snicker behind one's hand.

20 May 2000
Nebulas

The Nebulas were awarded tonight. Let's see how I did:

Well, I suppose a .333 batting average isn't too bad.

25 May 2000
Turning to the Dark Side

Since I haven't mentioned actual writing here in some time, I thought I'd follow through on my threat of some time back. I finally finished the first draft of the dystopian novel, and it stayed toward the charcoal end of grey the whole time. It still needs a lot of work—I did say it was a draft—but I think I actually managed to depict real characters, real problems, and real questions. I'm afraid that's a lot more than I can say for most utopian fiction, even if it is just my ego speaking.

Now it's fermentation time. I am not going to turn right around and begin revising. Unless one is working to an impending deadline, I believe that's the worst possible way to revise fiction. It's very much like relying upon one's own reading, and no other aids, to proofread one's work: it's too easy to assume that something really is clear, or really was said, because that's what was intended. Far better to let it sit, and work on something else to clear out the assumptions.

Thus, my charcoal drawing is going to sit facing the wall for a few weeks while I work on something else, probably a short piece that's been nudging me at the end of writing sessions. Or is that just the little voices in my head getting a little louder again?

So, what do I mean by a "charcoal grey" dystopia? The error that most utopian fiction (an individual novel may be "dystopian", but the variety of fiction is "utopian") makes is that the author has a clear agenda, and it's usually an Aristotelian choice. Brave New World, for example, is flawed by Huxley's insistence that physical health is directly correlated with both managerial ability and social status in his dystopia. This just doesn't make sense: even if congenital birth defects have been removed from the ruling caste, there will be accidents and nongenetic disease; even in a highly automated society, some types of physical labor, which would ordinarily be performed by the Epsilon caste, will require exceptional physical stamina or capability. This is a symptom of oversimplification, of polemic. Certainly there is some simplification in all fiction, and a utopia or dystopia inherently has some polemical quality; this is a matter of degree. A "grey utopia," however, requires the author to provide either multiple "good" alternatives, and force the characters (and ultimately the reader) to choose, or provide multiple "bad" alternatives, and force the characters (and ultimately the reader) to choose. Since this novel is on the charcoal end, it should come as no surprise that the alternatives all appear unattractive.

My characters can't get away with apathy, either; not choosing is itself a choice, with its own consequences. On the whole, I'm rather satisfied with the setting, the resolution, and two of the characters. It's that third viewpoint character that's causing the trouble.

Legal Issue of Concern: Some "new paradigm" start-up publishers, both electronic and POD, have been offering authors "stock" or "stock options" in lieu of cash payments. Don't do it. If you really, really, really think it's the right publisher, demand to see the registration documents for the securities. For that is what they are, however they are characterized by the (often merely naïve—but one never knows . . .) publishers. You don't want the potential headaches and liabilities (there, did that wake you up?) associated with unregistered securities. One particular POD/electronic publisher allegedly plans to put 500 books "in print" this year, and pay authors both advances and royalties. As the negotiations move on toward a contract, though, suddenly those "advances" and "royalties" become stock options (of speculative value), not cash. Given the total amount of money necessarily at issue, the promoters simply cannot avoid an SEC filing. They haven't done it, or if they have their filing failed to meet the clarity requirements so that one can find it.

29 May 2000
The Spanish Inquisition

Late last week, John Sullivan perceptively noted:

What's happening to short fiction specifically, as opposed to novels? There are more and more writers who just break in as novelists instead of working their way up the lengths as used to be expected. The market is vanishingly narrow for short stories, and the novel market is actually more accessible. I have more than once decided I should just follow that logic and ditch writing short stories entirely, but I keep coming back to it.

I love the concept of short fiction. I love spec fiction. Why don't I enjoy reading the magazines more than I do? Why am I not having fun?

I feel somewhat like the Spanish Inquisition. First, I thought there was one reason: readers have figured out the commercial-fiction bullshit. Then I realized that there are two reasons: readers have figured out the commercial-fiction bullshit, and the magazines are no longer a cost-effective means of delivering fiction to the taste of an individual reader. Then I realized . . . well, here's the whole list (taking advantage of automated numbering so I don't have to renumber each one as I add more):

1. Readers have figured out the commercial-fiction bullshit. In other words, the marketing approach no longer works. One really can't rely any longer on author names on the covers of magazines to sell more magazines. A couple of mainstream magazines have discovered this, to their chagrin; there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't hold true in speculative fiction, particularly since the speculative fiction audience is considerably better-educated (on average) than the audience of those particular magazines. Thus, just putting "Dexter Q. Bestsellingauthor" on the front cover does not sell enough more of a given issue to justify the extra that the magazine has to pay Dexter.
2. The magazines are no longer a cost-effective means of delivering fiction to the taste of an individual reader. With novels, one gets a known quantity—the whole schmear is by a single writer, take it or leave it. Magazines, though, by their very nature are much more fragmented. Given the narrow bookstore-price gap between an issue of, say, Asimov's and Belch the Barbarian, Book 32 (a paperback original from WeBWriters Press), it's not worth it to make an impulse purchase of Asimov's for the sake of a single story. This, though, is the success of speculative fiction coming back to haunt the magazines—because, a quarter century ago, the speculative fiction section in even the largest general bookstores seldom carried more than 50-75 titles. On the other hand, I can find more these days in many airport gift shops.
3. The corrollary of these two reasons: The pro-magazine stable of authors has ossified. In a given year, over 80% of the stories in the pro magazines are by authors who published a story in said magazine within the preceeding 36 months. (Yes, I went back and counted.) The remaining 20% is not all new authors, by any means; most are new to a given market, but are established pros, or merely haven't sold to that particular market in some time, but are established pros. The magazines used to be where one could find new voices; given that it's statistically easier to get a first novel published by a New York commercial publisher than a first short in one of the Big Four (Asimov's, F&SF, Analog, and Realms of Fantasy), it shouldn't surprise anyone that this is so. Bluntly, certain editors have gotten too cozy with their "stable" of authors and don't pay enough attention to the slush pile. They often want to pay more attention to the slush pile, but specious corporate demands (see reason 1) often get in the way.
4. Authors have fled the extreme poverty of magazine pay for the shabby-genteel poverty of book-length pay. And, of course, it's usually the best who leave first. This is not a new problem. However, the magazines haven't changed their pay scales significantly in nearly twenty years, while the dreams of riches for book-length authors get larger all the time. (That the dreams all too often become nightmares is the basis of my law practice.)
5. Speculative fiction is now respectable enough that the commercial mainstream publishes it. I wish. (I had to put one in here to keep y'all honest.) While it is certainly more possible now than in the 70s—witness The Sparrow, most of Richard Powers' recent work, A.S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie—but it's still not easy. A more-literary novel of speculative fiction from a first novelist, though, may well have a better shot at a mainstream publisher than it would at a genre publisher. Blame, or credit, this to the success of the Latin American magical realists since the mid-70s, and the slow acceptance of magical realism and outright surrealism in college literature and writing programs.

I have lots more, too, but it'll start becoming a case of "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam." The critical factor for me, though, is that the editors' tastes are largely becoming stale. This is not to say that they're bad editors, or can't recognize good work; far from it! But Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Dozois have been at the helms of their respective publications for many, many years now; Ms. McCarthy has been with Realms from its beginning, and was at Asimov's before that. What I suspect happens is that, given a choice between too roughly-equal works, one "traditional," one not, these established authors—with their well-honed sense of "traditional"—put a very heavy thumb on the scale. I'm not saying that the magazines of ten or twenty years ago were better; I'm saying that the magazines of today haven't gotten better.

<<<Last Month (April) — Next Month (June)>>>

• the fine print first (you'll need to replace "{at}" with "@" on the address line). Please come back soon.
• Return to
• Return to Surreality Check