Whatever

Which is why we ended up not eating this particular watermelon after we sliced it open. It also smelled a bit off, which added confirmation to our decision, but, really: Creepy animal flesh-looking watermelon was a “do not consume” item as soon as we cut it open. We all feel good about this decision.

Over at AMC this week, I look at the top 20 highest-grossing science fiction films of the decade to see what they might have in common. The title suggests what I may have found, and what I suggest based on the data might be the most successful science fiction film ever, if they ever made it, which, who knows, they just might. As always, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments over there.

Newbie writer complains about how rude I am to Black Matrix and presumably other non-pro markets over at SFSignal; I respond rather in length at comment twelve. Turning off comments on it here so if you want to comment, do it over there.

You know that thing where your kid sings “Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS, Jingle BELLS,” in an overexuberant yet tuneless manner for six hours straight? Yes, well, in the future it will seem more adorable in retrospect than it is right at the moment. So at least you have that to look forward to.

You’re welcome.

Subterranean Press zipped over to me a couple of early copies of the “Judge Sn Goes Golfing” chapbook so I could pet them and love them and rub my scent all over them (okay, that last bit was more than you needed to know), and I have to say I am delighted with how they’ve turned out. They look great, and by “great” I mean holy cow look at me I got a story illustrated by Gahan Wilson. In collaboration terms that’s a little like having Eddie Van Halen drop by your home studio to give song chorus you’ve been working on a little extra push. I’m so happy I could just plotz. You’ll know what I mean when you get it.

This reminds me that I’ve had a couple of questions about the length of “Judge Sn.” It’s 32 pages plus the cover, which is signed by me on the inside back. It’s the sort of thing designed specifically for fans and collectors, rather than the general public, which is why there’s a limited number of them out there. I think it’s worth the cost, but then I would. Heck, I think it’s worth it for the Gahan Wilson illustrations alone. Have I mentioned how geeked out I am about them? Well, I am.

Moving from “Judge Sn” to The God Engines, Paul Witcover reviewed TGE in the February Realms of Fantasy magazine (out now at news stands). I won’t reprint the whole thing here — hey, go buy a copy of the magazine, man — but here’s a nice pull quote:

[G]rippingly dark and subversive… though The God Engines is indisputably a work of fantasy, it is simultaneously a brutal critique of fantasy, a searing evisceration of the valuation of blind faith and magical thinking that underlies so much of the genre, at least at its most popular and mindless.

The whole review is actually very interesting (albeit with spoilers, which I suspect are unavoidable with this particular work), so check it out if you can.

And it was going before I got up the stairs to upload the pictures. Meanwhile, 30 mile an hour wind gusts and other various delights. But no snow! So that’s something. I may not have to eat one of the pets after all. Unless one of them annoys me.

Col. Van Barfoot, 90-year-old Medal of Honor winner, gets to keep his flagpole after all. It’s a Christmas miracle, it is!

Yes, I’ve seen the head-shaped cremation urn, in which the face looks vaguely like me. It’s been around for months. Please stop sending me links to it. It creeps the shit out of me. Thank you.

No, it’s not an iPhone. AT&T’s coverage where I live sucks. It’s an iPod touch. Why did I buy it?

1. It was time to get an eBook reader of some sort or another, and this can handle all the major formats and retailers;

2. Athena likes playing handheld games, and this I figure this is cheaper in the long run than a Nintendo DSi or Sony PSP, because the games are generally cheaper and more in line with her gaming interests;

3. While my Blackberry Storm has various apps for social networking, the fact of the matter is they pretty much generally suck in terms of UI, because the Storm is the red-headed stepchild of app development, and it shows in how apps generally perform on it. What also sucks: Storm’s Web browser. What also sucks: the Storm’s ability to allow me to access my blog’s backend. And so on.

This might not be a problem if I used my phone primarily as a phone, but in fact I use it primarily as a portable engine of social networking, and it’s finally got to the point where it isn’t really getting the job done. The iPod Touch has wifi, and I have one of those Boingo accounts (which codeshares with all the other paid wifi services) for when I’m someplace the wifi’s not free. So it’s pretty functional most places I go, and when it’s not, hey, I still have the Storm (to the Storm’s defense: Good e-mail and adequate camera. There).

4. What the Storm also sucks at: Playing music and video. Really non-intuitive and annoying, actually. For trips, I was lugging about an iPod anyway, so the iPod Touch is merely subbing out for a different piece of my geek travel load out. From a philosophical point of view, I wish the iPod Touch would accommodate my rented music from Rhapsody, but inasmuch as Rhapsody now has an app that lets me access the service via a wifi connection, this is not as huge an objection as it could be.

5. And also, you know: shiny pretty pretty gaah.

Go on, you can beat me now.

The discussion of speculative fiction writers, their markets and what the latter should be paying the former is now getting around in the SF/F geekosphere, which I think is all to the good; it’s one of those things we should talk about and often don’t, so I’m glad to have helped instigate the recent round. I have a couple of what I expect are closing thoughts on the matter, so here they are in bulletpoint form.

* First, my public thumping on Black Matrix Publishing for its ridiculous pay rate seems to have had an interesting effect on certain aspiring folks, along the lines of That arrogant bastard! How dare he tell me who I can and can’t submit to! I’m going to submit to pathetically-paying markets whether he likes it or not! News flash to such folks: Hey, I’m not your dad. Do whatever you want to do. I’m not going to stop you. I don’t think you’re generally helping yourself any, but it’s your karma, not mine. I’ve done my part by explaining why I think it’s a bad deal; you may agree or not depending on your own point of view. Fine with me. That said, later, when you come to me and say “wow, you were right, that was a bad idea,” I reserve the right to say “told you so.” Because I’m a dick that way, you see.

* One side effect of this discussion is that some folks seem to be under the impression that I’m of the opinion that every fiction outlet paying less than the SFWA pro rate should be wiped off the face of the Earth and that what is best in life is to crush these low-paying markets, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their editors. Well, no. The sf/f market is what it is. If you can’t place your work in the relatively few fiction markets that pay pro rates, then it’s time to look at the ones that pay less and see if they are worth your time.

But for God’s sake, people, show some discrimination. Writers are supposed to be smart, or at least clever. Use those meaty brains of yours and apply them to the business end of this problem. A market that might pay less than the pro rate but which is widely read and edited by professionals of long-standing reputation? Could be worth it. A “for the love” market of specific, limited scope, edited by knowledgeable enthusiasts, in which no one is making a penny off of anyone else (or planning to), but everyone’s having a good time? Might have its benefits. A for-profit market planning four magazines and two book lines, paying its contributors a fraction of a cent per word? Unmitigated fail. That’s pretty simple. Between those extremes, of course, is a lot of gray area.

Which is the thing. A market paying pro rates doesn’t really need to find some other way to justify itself; it pays pro rates (this in itself opens another can of worms, like those markets standing pat for years at the same very low “pro” rates, but never mind that for now). Every other market has to come in offering something else to make it worth the writer’s time, and I strongly feel that the dropoff on things like “exposure” and “sales credit” is pretty damn steep the further down the payscale you go. The money you get isn’t just about the money you get; there are a lot of intangibles that stick to that cash as well. After a certain point just having the “publishing credit” isn’t going to do it for you — I refer you to a comment on the matter by Hugo-winning editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden if you don’t want to believe me on this.

I get that some aspiring folks think this is all about writers who have “made it” being snobs and forgetting what it was like to be toiling away in the newbie writer salt mines. Well, leaving aside the fact that a “pro” rate of five cents a word means that even long-standing pros aren’t out of the salt mines, they’re just standing nearer to the fresh air, the reason the pros yammer on about this is because we do remember what it’s like to be newbies and to believe that any publication is better than no publication. But it wasn’t true then, it isn’t true now, and it won’t be true in the future, either. It’s tough to hear, but it’s the truth. So make sure you’re getting something for the nothing (or next-to-nothing) you’re getting paid. If you’re not, hold on to your work until you can get something, or, alternately, recognize that if the only market you can get interested in your work is one that hardly exists, maybe the best thing you can do for the work in question is hit it with a shovel and bury it by the river.

* One argument I hear from folks about placing their work in crap markets is that they’re not writing for the money anyway, so what does it matter if a market wants to pay a fraction of a penny a word? The answer is that these two things are not related at all: The reason one writes is utterly independent of whether someone else pays a fair rate for that work.

Hard as it may be to believe for some folks, I occasionally write something because I just feel like it, rather than because I need a check. But it doesn’t then follow that just because I wrote it for fun, that I should sell it, if I sell it, for less than my standard rates. The market doesn’t need to know why I wrote it; that’s not the market’s business. The market’s business is buying my work (or not) on the basis of the quality of the work itself.

Which is to say, don’t match your markets to your motivations; match your markets to the worth of the work itself. Because while writing for fun is fun, getting paid well for something you’ve written for fun is even more fun. Trust me, I know.

Zeus shows you how it gets done. You really do have to admire his form.

The holidays are about giving (well, actually, they’re not, but giving is what we do during the holidays, so close enough), and in that spirit, I and Subterranean Press have a gift for you. It’s a pdf version of Waiting for Athena, the printed chapbook that came as an extra with the signed, limited edition of Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. It collects up several Whatever entries I wrote at the end of Krissy’s pregnancy with Athena, and is filled with observations from an about-to-dad, as well at the letter I wrote to Athena on the day she was born. For newer Whatever readers, it’s a glimpse at what I was like 11 years ago (yikes!), while for older readers it’s a chance to relive some stuff that hasn’t been on the site in years. And for everyone, it’s amusing to see me panic in my delightfully overthinky way about the fact I would soon be a dad. Fun for everyone!

So: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Splendid Solstice, Delightful Non-Denominational Winter Gift-Giving season! Click here to download the pdf, or click on the image above. If you’re using Windows, you can right-click and use “save link as” to save it; I’m sure there’s some equivalent command on Macs and in Linux as well. Enjoy, and feel free to link and share.

Subterranean Press is being exceptionally groovy for letting me send Waiting for Athena out in the world to you, so allow me to plug my two current works with them for your consideration: The God Engines, my first-ever fantasy novella, and Judge Sn Goes Golfing, a special-edition signed chapbook featuring a short story set in the Android’s Dream universe. TGE is getting some of the best reviews any of my work has gotten, which makes me happy, and “Sn” is probably my personal favorite short story that I’ve written. Both are awesomely illustrated — TGE by Vincent Chong and “Sn” by the legendary Gahan Wilson –  and both are available on the SubPress site (TGE | Sn) and through Amazon (TGE | Sn), although if you want the signed limited of TGE, you’ll need to get it from Subterranean directly. Both are at the printers and will be shipped very soon (i.e., very likely before the scheduled release date on Amazon).

I’ll also note here that if you missed the hardcover edition of Hate Mail, the Tor edition is headed to stores in January. Yes, a busy couple of months for me, release-wise. That happens sometimes.

In any event, hope you have fun with Waiting for Athena, and thanks to each of you for reading Whatever and everything else. I’m glad you do.

Because I figure you might need an energy jolt right about now.

Via Metafilter.

There it is for you. Not much, and it may not last the day (it’s supposed to get into the mid-30s), but it qualifies. Yes, I know some of you have had more and earlier snow, but remember, it’s not a race.

First, thanks to everyone who sent good wishes and prayers yesterday; I appreciate it.

Second, spending Sunday doing things other than being here. I might pop in later tonight during Athena’s basketball practice but otherwise, I’ll catch you tomorrow. Don’t worry, you’re not missing much; I’ve been exceptionally boring the last couple of days. Promise.

If you would, spare a moment in your day to think a good thought for my mother-in-law Dora, whose own mother (Krissy’s grandmother, Athena’s great-grandmother) passed away early yesterday evening. This was not unexpected — Dora’s mom had been ill for a long while and it was clear this last week that it was time — but losing a parent is always rough. So if you would keep Dora in your thoughts today, I’d thank you for it.

Lee Goldberg just popped up in the comments here to give us the latest on the Harlequin vanity publisher mess. Good on the Mystery Writers of America for keeping Harlequin’s feet to the fire on this.

As I’ve been blathering about short story payment rates over the last couple of days, I’ve been getting inquiries via the e-mail channel about what I make when I write short fiction. Fair enough; I’ve talked about what I’ve made before in a general sense, so I’ll detail the short fiction part of it for you. But behind the cut, as I suspect some people are now officially bored with the topic, and some others might simply find me talking about what I make a bit obnoxious.

(Click below to read more…)

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Fresh from Louisiana, a gift of satsumas, a tangerine-like fruit, from a very kind Whatever reader who thought I and the family might enjoy them. And so we are. The fellow who sent them may announce himself if he wishes (I tend not to name names unless given explicit permission), but suffice to say his generosity made our day here both sweet and tart. Thank you, kind sir.

One of the things I’m finding interesting — and by interesting, I mean appalling – about my recent thumping upon Black Matrix Publishing for paying an insultingly low fifth a cent a word for its stories is that there’s a category of aspiring writer who appears genuinely offended that I would call out this company for paying its authors so very poorly. The complaint goes a bit like this, and you’ll understand that I’m excerpting from various sources:

It’s not really fair that Scalzi is singling out Black Matrix Publishing when so many others are doing the same thing. Doesn’t he remember what it was like to be a new writer? We can’t all make what the pros make. A market like this gives me hope. It’s not Scalzi’s business anyway.

Allow me to address each of these in turn.

“It’s not fair Scalzi is singling out Black Matrix Publishing” — This is an “if lots of people are cheapskates, you shouldn’t call out just one of the cheapskates” argument, which as you may expect is not an argument I have much time for. Sure, lots of other publishers might have business plans predicated on screwing the writer, but this is the one I was looking at that particular day, and its payment scale richly deserved comment and derision. Is this fair? Of course it is: Calling out ridiculously poor payment rates is always fair. One is not required to make a list of all known poorly-paying publishers in order to justly and fairly criticize one of them. If and when I call out another publisher for equally ridiculous payment levels, that’ll be fair too.

I do notice Black Matrix Publishing is currently wrapping itself in the “we’re just simple fans doing a hobby, here, we never intended to be a pro market” justification for paying writers badly. Really? Planning to publish four magazines and two separate book lines is a hobby? Does one generally create an LLC for one’s hobby? Call me skeptical. This is a business.

“Doesn’t he remember what it was like to be a new writer?” — Sure I do. And when I made my first science fiction sale, it was to Strange Horizons, because it was a market which made a point of paying what’s regarded as a pro rate in science fiction (and still does). Because even as a new writer, I felt very strongly that I deserved fair payment for my work, and, separately but equally importantly, I placed value on my work. Even as a newbie writer, I wouldn’t have sent a damn thing to a publisher like Black Matrix, because I assume my work deserves better than a market that values it that poorly.

Mind you, this isn’t limited to fiction, either — when I was starting out as freelance writer back in college and then again after I left AOL, I also didn’t write for markets which didn’t value my work; I wrote for the ones that paid me what I felt should be paid. It’s worked pretty well for me, and trust me, I am not so very special as a writer that this is not replicable for others.

“We can’t all make what the pros make” — Why not? All it takes is the decision not to take less than that for your work, and patience until you get to that point. This is why I advise writers to keep their day jobs. If you can’t or won’t wait, pick a lower amount you’re happy with, below which you do not go. Allow me to suggest that amount be a positive integer when it comes to pennies per word.

“A market like this gives me hope” — A market that thinks so little of you that it takes five words to get to a penny gives you hope? You need better hope standards, my friends.

Look, this is pretty simple: Black Matrix Publishing pays crap rates because it can. The people running it appear to be running it on a shoe string, if the proprietor’s lament about paying a few thousand dollars to date into it is correct, and they’re likely well aware that none of the other vendors providing elements for their little operation are so fungible in their costs as writers. The people who print their magazines will not be pleased to make 4% of their generally accepted “pro rates” for their printing services; the Staples down the street is not going to give them a 96% discount on pens and printer cartridges. The only group of people so willing to offer such a steep discount on services rendered are writers. Why? “Because at least they pay something.” “Because I’m working my way up.” “Because no one writes this stuff to make money.” “Because it gives me hope.”

Bullshit. Someone intending to make a profit off your words offering you a fifth of a penny per word isn’t giving you hope, he’s giving you the shaft — and he’s banking on your psychological need for approval and recognition in a field you want to be a part of to make you grab your ankles and sings his praises while he reams you. This isn’t hope, it’s Aspiring Writer Stockholm Syndrome. Snap out of it.

“It’s not Scalzi’s business anyway” — Sure it is. I’m a writer. It’s in my interest to call out markets that in my opinion are taking advantage of writers, because I prefer a marketplace filled with markets that value the work I provide, not filled with markets that take as read that writers will be pathetically grateful just to be published not matter how badly you pay them. How would I feel if Black Matrix Publishing folded its tent? Delighted. Good riddance to publishers who value writers so poorly. But what would make me even more delighted is if the proprietors stopped saying they were committed to writers and actually showed some commitment by paying something more than a fraction of a cent per word. I think it’s not too much to ask. I also think it’s my business to say so.