Whatever

As I noted over on Twitter, this just-released press release from the Susan G. Komen foundation looks like a blink. Feel free to comment on what you believe are the motivations and consequences in the comments. Be polite to each other or I’ll whack you with the Mallet of Loving Correction.

Also, I’m continuing my fundraiser in any event. Just to be sure.

Edit: A take on the apology from the women at Jezebel.

That’s when the rising sun melts the frost on the ground except for where the frost was covered by a shadow. And then the frost takes on the shape of the shadow. It’s like having a shadow in negative. Until it melts. Just one of those cool things you get to see every once in a while. Thought I’d share.

You Los Angelenos should be aware that I will lurk among you this April, as I am going to be a participant in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. What shall I do there? Festivate, of course! On the subject of books! Also, I know they’re planning a panel for me to be on. With other people of my kind. I can’t go into details now. Suffice to say that if the panel goes off as we intend, you will squee with delight. Even those of you who have promised yourself that you will never squee. You will squee. It’s not like I’m making a demand. It will be that you have no choice but to squee. It’ll be well nigh physiological.

I may have said too much.

In any event: Los Angeles. April 21 – 22. Festival of Books. Me. Potential Squeetasticness.

We’re all caught up now.

Many of you have heard that the Susan G. Komen Foundation (the folks who do all that pink-related branding regarding breast cancer) is withdrawing its financial support from Planned Parenthood, which in the past did breast cancer screening and education for lots of poor women with funds offered by the Foundation. The Komen folks swear their choice to do this is not politically motivated, to which my response is yeah, right. Keep trying that line and see where it gets you.

Regardless of the motivations, what it means is that poor women, and women with poor access to women’s health care, are getting screwed again for reasons that have nothing to do with them. I know, I know, these women should have thought about reasonable access to health care pertaining to their own gender before they decided to go ahead and be poor. It’s their own fault, isn’t it. The poor. So stupid. And in this case women to boot. So they count even less. And if they have to rely on health services from an organization that also offers legal health services some people oppose, well, then they deserve what they get even more, don’t they.

The Komen folks are perfectly within their rights not to fund Planned Parenthood’s initiatives for breast cancer screening and education, even if they’re not honest enough to come right out and say it’s part of an overall right-wing agenda against Planned Parenthood. But I don’t think it’s right that poor women get caught in the crossfire. They don’t deserve to die just because they can’t afford to catch their cancer early.

Just a few minutes ago I pinged Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press and asked if it would be possible to track the sales of my eBooks in the next week in order to donate my share of those sales to Planned Parenthood, specifically for its breast cancer initiatives. He said it was, in the United States at least, and that SubPress would donate its share as well.

So, between today and February 8, 2012, every time you buy a Subterranean Press eBook written by me here in the United States, the proceeds are going to Planned Parenthood. I will direct that the donation go specifically toward their breast cancer screening and educational activities, to help replace the funding lost from the Susan G. Komen Foundation. What ebooks does this cover? Here’s a list on Kindle; here’s another on the Nook. eBooks sold in other formats for other readers here in the US will be covered, too.

Is this a political statement? As much as the Susan G. Komen’s decision not to fund Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening and education programs is. If you want to argue that wasn’t a political move at all, then neither is this. If you think otherwise, then you may think likewise about this. Either way, if this helps someone who couldn’t otherwise get access to breast cancer screening and education save her own life, I figure at least one person will come out ahead. And that works for me.

Update, 2/2, 11:12 am: In a little under 24 hours, from Amazon alone, we’ve raised $1681.79. Thanks, folks!

Update, 2/3, 10:13 am: Now we’re at about $2,700. Nice.

Update, 2/3, 11:45: The Susan G. Komen Foundation blinks. However, this fundraiser will continue as planned. Call it paranoia.

This is what February 1 looks like outside my bedroom window just a couple of minutes ago.

As a compare and contrast, here’s what it looked like a year ago today:

Note that the patchy-looking parts of the lawn in last year’s picture are actually patches of ice that were thick enough to step on without cracking. It’s currently 50 degrees outside, which is more than double what it was the same time last year. I can walk outside without shoes and not worry about losing a toe (or slipping and falling on my ass). It’s a little weird.

Yes, I know, insert snark about climate change here. It’s actually not the warmest it’s ever been around here on a February 1st; it was 14 degrees warmer than today on February 1, 1989. Although I don’t doubt the earth is warming (AND THAT HUMANS HAVE A HAND IN IT, PEOPLE), I do chalk this up to relatively normal weather variation.

I should be delighted about this, and the fact we’ve had relatively few snow days here — yay! For once winter doesn’t suck! — but to be honest with you it makes me a little nervous. This is my 11th February here in Ohio; to have it this far out of whack from the usual makes me twitchy and suspicious that summer is going to be hellacious. We will see, I suppose. In the meantime, I’m going to try to appreciate my snow-and-ice-free February 1. Without undue paranoia.

In another bit of SFWA-related news, the organization has chosen to delist Dorchester Publishing as a qualifying market, after a year-long period of probation. You may read SFWA’s public statement on the delisting here.

This is, I think, a positive development for SFWA:

Oh, I should probably mention. I'm running for SFWA vice president. My statement of candidacy is in the forums.

—
Rachel Swirsky (@rachelswirsky) February 01, 2012

If you’re a SFWA member, you may read her platform here. If elected, she would succeed Mary Robinette Kowal, who has done an unbelievably excellent job in four years on the SFWA board (two as secretary, two as VP).

I’ve known Rachel for a number of years now and have been deeply impressed with her. I think she would be a very fine VP, if she were elected. If I were re-elected to the president’s chair, I would be happy to serve with her.

(PS: She’s also a fantastic writer.)

Sometimes you’re awake in the middle of the night, not by choice, and need something to distract you from the fact that you’re not able to go back to sleep. What do you do? In my FilmCritic.com column this week, I offer some suggestions for insomniac science fiction. Some of them are good films, others… not so much. But all work at 3am. And if you want, you can offer your own suggestions for insomniac science fiction in the comments.

I interrupt this blog to bring you an importance notice from Hugo-winning author David Levine, of vital importance to those of you in the Pacific Northwest! Take it away, David:

“As you may know, the Science Fiction Writers of America have been holding a quarterly reading series at the Kennedy School in Portland. They are also inaugurating a reading series in the Seattle area.  See http://www.sfwa.org/for-readers/sfwa-northwest-reading-series/ for more information.

“Ted Kosmatka, one of the scheduled readers for this week’s readings, has had to drop out due to a death in the family, and I’ve been asked to step in.  So if you’d like to hear me read from my upcoming story “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang” (a steampunk power-armor story set in the Australian Outback in 1880), along with John A. Pitts (Portland and Seattle), Ken Scholes (Portland), and possibly a special guest star (Seattle), you can come to the readings as follows:

PORTLAND:
Tuesday, January 31
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave. Portland, OR 97211
RSVP (optional) at http://is.gd/cmg5HR

SEATTLE:
Wednesday, February 1
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Wild Rover Restaurant and Pub, 111 Central Way, Kirkland, WA 98033
RSVP (optional) at http://is.gd/F30Pvi

“Both events are free and open to the public.  Beer, wine, and other typical bar fare will be available for purchase. Dancing is optional, but not discouraged.  Hope to see you there!”

And there you have it, Portlanders and Seattleites — your next two evenings, solved. Go and enjoy!

Question, which seems apt considering the previous post today:

Any thoughts on Jonathan Franzen’s opinions about eBooks?

For those of you who have not seen them, they are here. For those disinclined to link, here’s a quote:

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring… Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.

On one hand I get what he’s saying, because I do love physical books. Today I got copies of the Spanish language version of Fuzzy Nation, and holding the physical printed object brings home the point that yes, someone bought the book, yes, someone printed it, and yes, people will read the thing (in another language, even!). A printed physical object ties  into my personal sense of accomplishment when it comes to books. It’s like, here it is. In the real world. Finally. I think the love of books as tactile objects is something that’s going to be around for a while, and not just because writers need to be assured there is a (presumably) permanent, unalterable record.

On the other hand I suspect Franzen overprivileges the permanence of the book as a physical object to a considerable degree, and if you want to know why I think that, try reading an original science fiction pulp paperback from the 70s or earlier. They were printed on crappy acidic paper that started turning yellow nearly the moment they got off the printing press, the glue on the spine crumbles, and the thing starts falling apart the second you look at it too hard. You can hold one of these books, but if you try to read it, you run a really good chance of destroying it in the process. Bibliophiles — the ones who love physical books at least — are aware that physical books are anything but permanent. There are lots of ways for them to go away.

Here’s another way of looking at it. I have a copy of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station on my shelf (it’s the gorgeous limited edition by Subterranean Press). I also have a digital copy of it on my Nook. Which is more permanent? One is a physical object, but that physical object could be lost or stolen, or destroyed if, say, my house burned down to the ground, taking my library with it. The digital object, on the other hand, is hard to lose because it can be in multiple places; I can read it on my computer, or my eReader, or my cell phone or my computer tablet; indeed, I can read it one one, set that down and fire it up on the other and have the book open to the very spot I stopped reading it before. If my house burns up, my digital copy of Perdido will still be there to comfort me. But if Barnes & Noble goes out of business — and it might — then I may be screwed, because there’s no guarantee the access to the book file will survive Barnes & Noble as a company (I have some useless DRMed audio files on my computer as testament of that).

There are other ways that both physical books and digital books can go away, but you get my point, I trust, which is that neither physical books nor digital books have any claim on permanence that can’t be immediately refuted in significant ways. The one unassailable advantage physical books have or digital books is that they don’t require an intermediary piece of hardware to access them — all you need is your eyeballs — and given the turnover in tech hardware, that’s not insignificant. But it doesn’t argue for permanence; it argues for a potentially longer window for information decay.

(Franzen’s also incorrect that physical copies somehow limit the alterations that can be made to texts after the fact; Compare early versions of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles with later versions and you’ll see what I mean. There’s an excellent chance people who have read the later versions are entirely unaware that the text has been significantly altered. Franzen’s also apparently charmingly naive about the number of copy errors that make it through the editorial process, despite everyone’s best efforts.)

Franzen’s dislike of eBooks appears essentially to be an appeal to the romanticism of physical books, which is nice and about which I can sympathize with him, although only up to a point. Ultimately, however, my more pragmatic side comes through, and it says “You want this book in [x] format? You’ll pay me money for it? Here you go.” Which is why my books are variously in hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, eBook (in various formats) and audio (also in various formats), depending on their place in the production cycle and the agreements I have in place with publishers.

Outside of the desire to see my local indie bookstore stay in business, because they are awesome folks and it’s a great shop, and in a larger sense for bookstores to survive because of what I see as the long terms social benefits of having booksellers as part of the matrix of commerce, I’m agnostic regarding format. The words — my words — are the same across all the formats, and it’s those words that matter; the container, less so. I’d note Franzen’s work is out there for electronic consumption, so it seems at the end of the day he is pragmatic about this at well, at least on a contractual level.

I’m going to touch on something that I’ve discussed briefly before but which I think is worth reheating into its own post. Here are the best selling books in the US from 1912, which is (for those of you for whom math is not a strong suit) 100 years ago.

1. The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter
2. The Street Called Straight by Basil King
3. Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
4. The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Davies
5. A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson
6. The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright
7. The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester
8. The Net by Rex Beach
9. Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
10. Fran by J. Breckenridge Ellis

Questions: How many of these have you read? How many of the author names do you recognize? How influential have these books been to modern literature, or at the very least, the literature you choose to read? Do you think these authors believed that their works would, in some way, survive them? I think it’s fair to say that outside of a small group of academic specialists or enthusiasts, these books and their authors don’t have much currency.

This isn’t a slight on the authors or their works, mind you. If you look up some of these authors, they’re pretty interesting. Gene Stratton-Porter was an early conservationist and owned her own movie studio. Meredith Nicholson was a US diplomat to several countries in South America and central America. Howard Bell Wright was reportedly the first author to make more than a million dollars writing fiction, and this was back in 1912, when a million was worth more than $22 million today. I don’t doubt at least some of these books were well-regarded as art. And I would imagine, author egos being what they are, that at least a couple of them imagined that we would be talking about their works today, a hundred years later, as influences if nothing else.

We’re not. Now, I imagine there’s at least a couple people out there shaking their fists at me, wondering how I could not see Stratton-Porter (or whomever) as a towering figure in American literature. As noted above, I cede there is possibly academic or specialized interest. I’m talking about everyone else. I feel pretty confident of my basic knowledge of early 20th century literature, if nothing else than through my interest in HL Mencken, who was one of the preëminient literature critics of the day. If I’m coming up blank on these names and books, I feel reasonably confident in suggesting most readers these days — even the well-read ones — will do similarly.

If you’re a writer, this might depress you. If the best-selling books of 1912 are largely forgotten, what chance do your books have in 2012, especially if they don’t scale the heights of sales these books have? Surprise! Probably little. I mean, it’s certainly possible they will survive: Neither Theodore Dreiser nor Sherwood Anderson got near the year-end bestseller lists between 1910 and 1919, but they are still taught and discussed, and in their way influence literature today. But, yeah. Don’t count on it.

And that’s fine. Relieve yourself of the illusion that you’re writing for the ages. The ages will decide who is doing that on their own; you don’t get a vote. I understand the temptation is to try to write something that will speak to the generations, but, look, in 1912 they hadn’t even yet invented pre-sliced bread. If you aim for being relevant to the future, you’re probably going to fail because you literally cannot imagine it, even if you write science fiction.

Forget even sliced bread; you can’t imagine the values or interests or views on the world that people might have a century from now. Human nature as defined by biology doesn’t change much over decades or centuries but the culture sure does, and it’s a moving target in any event; there’s no end point in attitudes and opinions. If I tried to explain a woman’s place in 1912 United States to my daughter, she would explode with outrage. If a writer in 1912 tried to write specifically to my daughter (or anyone’s daughter) 100 years hence, the disconnect would be impressive. If I tried to write for a thirteen-year-old girl in 2112, the same thing would happen.

If you must aim for relevance, try for being relevant now; it’s a context you understand. We can still read (and do read) Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dickinson, and I think it’s worth noting Shakespeare was busy trying to pack in the groundlings today, Cervantes was writing in no small part to criticize a then-currently popular form of fiction, and Dickinson was barely even publishing at all, i.e., not really caring about future readers. In other words, they were focused on their now. It’s not a bad focus for anyone.

Will your work survive? Probably not, but so what? You won’t survive, either. 100 years from now you’re very likely to be dead. Even if your work survives, it won’t do you much good. In the meantime that still leaves lots of people today to potentially read your stuff, argue about it, be inspired by it (or react against it) and generally make a lot of noise about it. You might even make a living at it, which is a bonus. Focus on those people today, and on today’s times. Enjoy it all now. Enjoy it while it lasts. Then when it’s over, you can say you had fun at the time.

The Kayip Rithim Web site, which is a Turkish site for science fiction and fantasy, has posted the opening chapter of the Turkish translation of Old Man’s War in advance of the book’s publication in (I think) March. Curious as to how the text looks in Turkish? Of course you are. You can find out here.

Here are three questions I was recently asked about writing. I’m going to condense the questions, because when they were asked, they meandered across several paragraphs; they boil down to three sentences, which are:

When may you call yourself a writer? When may you call yourself a professional writer? When may you say you are a good writer?

These are three separate but related questions. Let’s start with the most fundamental.

When may you call yourself a writer?

I tend to be very small-c catholic on this question and say that if you write at all, you can consider yourself a writer. This annoys people who think that tweeting about your lunch or posting on Facebook that your cat horked up a hairball does not rise to the level of true writing, but, look, writing is an act of setting down in words the things about which you have a concern. If you are literate and you can manage to create meaning from the written word, you are, on a very basic level, a writer, even if what you’re writing is “I’ve gone to the store for milk. Be back soon.”

But for the sake of argument, let’s tighten this up a bit. Let’s say that just being able to write a meaningful sentence doesn’t make you a writer, any more than being able to lie with a straight face makes you an actor, or doodling in a boring meeting makes you an artist. So where does the line exist, over which one may say “I’m a writer”?

In this scenario, the line manifests with intent. Does the person sending out an e-mail about where everyone is meeting for after-work drinks intend to write? Other than in the most practical and mechanical sense, no. E-mailing everyone is simply the easiest way to get the information to the largest number of people involved, with the best chance those people will get the information. If it were easier and more practical to send a group voice mail, that would be what would happen.

A writer, on the other hand, chooses written words, and chooses them not just for mechanical and practical reasons, but for (or also for) esthetic and artistic purposes. Writers want to write, rather than have to write. In presenting an idea, the medium they intend for it to be in is the written word.

This is still a bar too low for some people, but screw them, those guys are snobs. I say that if you want to write, and then you do write, then you are writer.

However, it doesn’t make you a good writer. I’ll give you an example, using a different creative field. I recently got a ukulele, and I enjoy playing it, and I actively make music with it. I am a musician. But I’m not a good musician, because right now my chording is merely adequate and my strumming is marginal. I’m no Jake Shimabukuro, nor am I likely ever to be. But that’s fine because I don’t play ukulele to be the best ukulele player ever; I play it because I enjoy it and it’s fun.

Likewise, people may call themselves “writers” even if they recognize they are not very good at it at the moment, or if they suspect they may never be, but just enjoy it anyway. The act of writing — of putting ideas into the medium of the written word — is sufficient. You write? You meant to do that? What you’ve written is intelligible to other humans? Congratulations, you’re a writer.

When may you call yourself a professional writer?

Are you writing with the intent to be paid? Are you being paid? Is writing consistently one of the ways in which you make your living over time? If the answers to each of these is “yes,” then you can probably get away with calling yourself a “professional writer.”

Note that writing, in general, is not a profession in the same manner as being a medical doctor is a profession. You don’t have to go to school to be a writer (I didn’t), you don’t need to have a degree or a certification in the subject to practice it (I don’t), you don’t have to be licensed to do it (at least not in the US) and there are few if any laws that govern its practice. Now, you can go to school for writing, get degrees in the field and even join associations or unions of writers, who may have their own definitions of what constitutes a professional level of achievement (see, as an example, the membership requirements for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, of which I am currently president). But those are choices, not requirements. If you write science fiction and fantasy, you should belong to SFWA (thus ends my plug). But if you don’t, it’s not as if the police will come to the door and arrest you for fraud.

“Professional” in this sense means that you are in the stream of commerce — which is to say, you offer your writing (or your talents as a writer) for sale, and your writing and/or talents are being used and compensated for by others. In my own opinion, for saying that you’re a professional writer, it helps to be able to show that you’ve been able to make money at writing over time. Getting paid for any writing is not a bad thing, mind you. If you get paid for it, whatever the circumstance, then good for you. But let me give you an example from my own experience. When I was in college, I took third place in a student writing competition for a short story, for which I received $250. I got paid for that writing. Did it make me a professional writer of fiction? Not really, since I didn’t then write another piece of fiction for sale for another decade.

I sold a science fiction short to Strange Horizons in 2001, but it too was something of a one-off, more of an experiment to see if I could sell a short story than an entrance into the field as a profession. I date my professional entry into the world of fiction with my sale of Old Man’s War to Tor in 2002, because among other things it was part of a two-book deal, i.e., I’d be getting paid for my fiction work over time. Even then, it wasn’t until Old Man’s War was published in 2005 that I felt comfortable saying I was a professional fiction writer. Now, that’s just me (and note that since I could call myself a pro writer for other reasons, having patience on that part was not difficult for me). Some folks really really really want to call themselves a pro writer the first time they get a check. I’m not going to go out of my way to crap on them for it if they do.

It’s important to note that “professional” is not the same thing as “good,” although in my opinion it does correlate pretty well with “competent”; it’s hard to make money from writing if you can’t actually write. But it’s entirely possible to be a professional, published writer and be only competent. This is because, as I noted long ago, publishing is about what is competent rather than what is “good;” “good” is a value judgement, where “competent” is a standard that’s as objective as we can get when we talk about language. Even in the realm of self-publishing, financially successful writing has to be competent at least.

Which brings us to the third question:

When may you call yourself a good writer?

When you are in control of your instrument. In the case of fiction in particular, this means having the ability to make your reader have the emotional response you intended for them to have, when you set down to write. To put it another way, when a competent writer tells you a story, you know what happened. When a good writer tells you a story, you feel it happen to you.

(When a great writer tells you a story, you feel your life change because of it. But let’s not worry about that one now.)

Caveat: there is no bright line between “competent” and “good.” Some writers can be good in some aspects of writing and merely competent in others. Other writers are competent today and good tomorrow, and vice versa. Good writers can have bad days; competent writers can have really good days, and then later be unable to repeat the performance at will. Writers often can’t tell when what they’re writing is good or just competent (or worse). This is one reason why so many of us are completely neurotic.

And here’s something that really sucks — being a good writer doesn’t necessarily mean that any particular thing you’ve written will get published, because being published is contingent on several things, some of which are not about the writing. I’ve noted here before that when I guest-edited Subterranean Magazine, I had to reject about half the stories I really wanted to buy because I only had so much space and money. I had to pick and choose. The stories I rejected were good, and it killed me to have to let them go.

For all of that, a good writer is good at writing more often than not; the baseline skill is established and it’s at a high level. How a writer becomes good is pretty much like how anyone becomes good at anything: Practice, practice, practice. Talent plays into it but I think talent is overrated and overprivileged, and there are lots of writers with raw talent who never pan out because they expect that raw talent should be all they have to bring to the game. Surprise! It’s not. Lots of good writers are good simply because they’ve learned their craft and they’ve honed their skill.

I am a good writer, but I was a published writer before I was a good writer. The dividing line for me happened in 1997, after I spent a year as an editor for a humor magazine that ran on AOL. Before then I was a competent writer who assumed he was good because he was arrogant; after I had been an editor and spent time dealing with other people’s writing I was able to see the flaws and problems in mine, and it made a difference. I think being a published writer before one is a good writer is not unusual. Lots of competent writers learn to be good writers on the job. It’s part of that whole “practice, practice, practice” thing.

My advice to anyone who wants to be a good writer is simple: Stop thinking about being a good writer and start thinking about being a better writer. Work on the things you know you want to improve on. Stop thinking that you’re going to cross some line and then suddenly you’ll be a good writer. It doesn’t work that way, and even good writers still have things to work on (trust me on this).

You’ll know when you’re a good writer when your craft is good enough that you don’t worry about whether you can do what you want to do with your writing, and instead you wonder about how you’re going to do it. You probably won’t notice the first time this happens. When you do notice it, it probably won’t be a big deal. You’ll be more focused on the writing.

The Newark mayor the subject of same-sex marriage, specifically in New Jersey, but generally applicable everywhere.

When courts decide for same-sex marriage, those who oppose it say it should be the choice of legislatures. When legislatures decide for it, those who oppose it say it should be the choice of the voters. I have no doubt whatsoever that if the voters decided for it, those who oppose it would be in the courts trying to stop it. The folks who oppose same-sex marriage don’t really want anyone to say it’s okay. They just want it not to exist.

I went to go make myself a cheese quesadillia today because cheese+tortilla+1 minute in the microwave = GAAAAHCHEEZYGOODNESS, and I noticed that we have two bags of tortillas in the refrigerator, but one is labeled “Original Wraps,” and the other is “Large Flour Tortillas.” The tortillas inside both are exactly the same — same size, same calorie count, etc — but I also happen to notice that the “wraps” package is a six count package, while the “flour tortilla” package is an eight count package.

So then I went upstairs to my computer (taking my cheese quesadilla with me, because research is hungry work), to check to see what the pricing was on both packages. On Netgrocer.com the 6-count package of Mission Wraps is $3.85, while the 8-count package of Mission Large Flour Tortillas is $3.59. The individual product — the flat, thin object made of flour — is exactly the same, but apparently if you call it a wrap, you can charge more, and offer fewer per package — than you can if you call it a tortilla.

Please note here that my methodology here is highly anecdotal — I have checked but one online retailer and but one brand of wrap/tortilla. That said, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to discover that in a general sense “wraps” come in packages with fewer units in them, and that on a per unit basis they are significantly more expensive than when the same objects are called “tortillas.”

Why “wraps” might be more expensive than “tortillas” despite in fact being the same damn thing is an exercise I leave to the reader. I’d personally like to believe it’s something other than a food manufacturer and/or retailer catering to the latent insecurities of white people when presented with an ethnic food object as exotic as a tortilla. Whatever the reason, as a consumer tip, may I suggest that the next time you plan to make a wrap of some sort, that you head for the tortillas. You might save yourself a little cash.

Hey there — Subterranean Press has released another on of my short stories for the Kindle and Nook: “Tale of the Wicked,” which originally showed up in the New Space Opera 2 anthology, back in 2009. It’s got spaceships and aliens and battles and computers and explosions, not necessarily in that order, and it’s a pretty good story if I do say so myself. Here’s the link to the Kindle edition, and to the Nook edition. In the UK? There’s a Kindle edition for you too. Everywhere else in the world? Working on it.

While I’m pointing that out, this is also a fine time to note that SubPress also released a different short story of mine a few weeks back, which I completely forgot to mention because I was busy training were-badgers to do my dark bidding. Nevertheless I’m telling you now that “An Election,” my 2010 of a human guy running for a city council post in a district dominated by alien races, is also now available in Kindle and Nook formats. it does not feature spacecraft and explosions, but it does feature aliens — quite a few of them — plus local politics and lots of humor. So I think you’ll dig it if you haven’t read it already. It’s also available on Amazon UK.

Both stories go for 99 cents in the US and 77, what? Pence? in the UK. Enjoy.

It’s come round that time when the Election Committee of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America makes its call for candidates to serve on our board. I have decided to step forward once more (last, last very last time I swear) as a candidate for President, a position to which I was first elected in 2010. I had originally intended to step down at the end of this term, but on reflection decided there were still some things I wanted to accomplish in the role, and it made sense to try them over the course of an additional year. Whether I get that year will be up to SFWA members, of course; they may be tired of me and my management style. In which case I hope they elect someone else, rather than, say, stabbing me Caesar-style at the Nebula Awards. Please, SFWA members: No stabbing. That’s pointy and hurts.

If you are a SFWA member, you may read my candidacy letter and platform in the SFWA Elections Forum. For everyone else, to summarize, my platform this year focuses on threading the needle of creator rights in the electronic age, taking advantage of SFWA’s imminent incorporation in California to fundraise, particularly for our medical and legal funds, and to use new ideas to promote the literature of science fiction and fantasy. And since last year’s VOLCANO-POWERED LASER was completed and deployed (bwa ha ha ha ha HAH ha), I will this year work on bulking up on SFWA’s corps of HYPER-INTELLIGENT WERE-BADGERS, who will come in the night against all those who would try to mess with our members’ livelihoods. That’s right, were-badgers. You think you’re ready to fight a were-badger. But really, you are not. You’re just not.

Let me also take a moment to note to the SFWA members among you that you may wish to consider to run for office as well, even for the position of President. There are five positions up for election: President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and Western Regional Director. SFWA does good work for its members and for writers, but that work is dependent on the service of volunteers, including board members. It’s entirely possible to serve on SFWA’s board and maintain an active career — I’ve written two books while serving on the board (and am working on one now) and will have released three by June 30. Serving on the board is work, but it’s not all-consuming. Think about what SFWA does for you, and then ask if it’s time for you to do for SFWA. Here’s the call for candidates, in SFWA’s forums. Give it some thought, please.

This is not the first time Krissy has been caught hugging babies with her teeth. But can you blame her? They are so tender! You could just eat them up! Just!

Note: The baby survived, largely untasted.