Scarlet Letters

The story of my crazed consortium is today's guest blog on Apex.

Today a friend of mine got some bad news. She's been fighting her third bout with breast cancer for years now, and the latest scans came back not so good. It's on the bone again, and there's small growth in the existing tumors. It's back to radiation for her. She's just one of my friends battling cancer. You know who else? The kind and funny man who sings next to me in choir. Macie's partner, Gail. The taciturn alto in the next row. My stepfather. That's just this year. THIS YEAR. Know who else is fighting or has fought cancer? Kiddo's Sunday School teacher. The mother of Kiddo's friend. Kiddo's former babysitter. The wife of a dear friend. More friends than I can name. My stepmother. And we won't even talk about the fathers, sisters, mothers, cousins, grandparents, brothers, children, friends and others whom we've lost. Without even looking at my address book, I can name three people who've lost their fathers in the...

ME: Stupid characters! ISABEL: I really think that's the wrong attitude. If you say mean things about your characters on Twitter, they'll never do what you want them to do. ME: They won't do what I want them to do anyway. They don't talk to me. ISABEL: I'm doing the best I can. ME: It's not your fault. You just aren't a guns-and-smartass type. ISABEL: See, if you would just let those two fall in love... ME: No. ISABEL: Please? ME: No. ISABEL: *pouts* I never get to have fun anymore. ME: Neither do I. SUPERMOM: Would you stop glaring at me? ME: I am not glaring at you. I'm aware that it's May. SUPERMOM: May is my month. We have things to do. This is why we don't do conventions in May. ME: I'm aware. SUPERMOM: End of school. Planning summer break. Field Day. Spring cleaning. Orchestra concerts. Cub Scouts graduation. Ramp-up to Relay. LOIS: To say nothing of actual work. ME: Certainly saying nothing of it. LOIS: You're awa...

Utah strikes again . Some journalism seniors hid words for male and female genitalia in their final issue of the Daily Chronicle at the University of Utah. Now the university is threatening to withhold their diplomas. I'm torn. They finished their degree work, they earned their diplomas, they have a right to graduate and the university should not try to censor them. However, this is the sort of crap I'd expect of high schoolers, not college students about to graduate. Yes, we've all done the parody issue; I was even involved in one, peripherally. But that's what you do for your April 1 edition, and it should be labeled as such. Our story that aliens kidnapped the rodeo team was clearly satire. This was in a legitimate issue, and of utterly puerile "humor."  The Student Press Law Center is taking up their cause , along with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And rightly so. Under no circumstances should these students be denied diplomas an...

Do not.

In the lovely month of May, a woman's fancy turns to thoughts of ravenous rotting reanimated corpses. What? It's really and truly Zombie Awareness Month, not something I just made up to amuse myself. This link is from last year, but the gray ribbon amuses me. Sponsored by the Zombie Research Society (slogan: What You Don't Know Can Eat You), they explain here. Celebrate by buying THE COLD ONES! Because you know the sequel is on its way... and I'm currently writing it. Which means I need victims. LOTS of victims. And your names are so nice and juicy... Happy Zombie Awareness Month!

Because we can . Thank you, First Amendment. Because GLBT doesn't just mean sex scenes; but the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters in genre fiction. Because the definition of pornography in Miller vs. California states that the work as a whole must be offensive under the community's standards AND of no redeeming cultural value, which has never fit anything we sell, so those that choose to redefine the word can categorically bite me. Because fiction with GLBT characters and fiction by GLBT authors deserves an equal place in the literary world. Please visit the site this week and check out our books. Some of them have GLBT characters; some are by GLBT authors; and some do, in fact, have same-gender sex scenes. Gasp! Enjoy, folks.

Or so Mother Bennett said when we were in the middle of that bishop thing. Associated Content ran a piece on Propay vs. the Literary Underworld, quoting my previous blog post extensively. Unfortunately I guess Propay didn't comment, and there's already trolls! Apparently I'm just "bitter" about "being declined" and must've been rejected by Paypal too. Hee. For the record, in case anyone cares: Propay made it very clear in all our communications that we were turned down because of our content, not because of anything having to do with our business structure or credit, and our site is protected by an SSL certificate. Now, whether Propay has the legal right to reject a customer based on legally-protected content under the First Amendment is for someone smarter than me to say - I'm betting probably they do. But being legal doesn't make it right. That's why I stated it publicly, so my fellow entrepreneurs can choose with whom they do bu...

I cannot recall a recent time when I have been so angry. As you probably know, I started doing the speculative-fiction convention circuit about six years ago, upon the sale of my first novel. After a few years, I saw how silly it was for each of the authors to get a separate table in the dealer's room just to hawk our own books. It was a waste of space in the convention hall, a waste of time and money for us - you have to sell a metric ton of books to be able to make your costs back when you're solo on a table, and there's no one to back you up when you need a break from shilling your wares. So I started sharing tables, first with a couple of my close friends who also were doing the circuit, and then bringing in other authors we met at conventions. Soon I began carrying their stock with me on tour, in the hopes that I could drum up a few extra sales for them at shows they couldn't attend. They were horror, science fiction, fantasy… and the occasional paranormal roma...

They say if you fold a thousand cranes, you can make a miracle happen. And we called her Miracle Girl. Jennie Sutton had cystic fibrosis. Her lungs destroyed themselves from the inside out, and by the time I met her and her mother, Selena Rochlis, she was already on the transplant list. The disease had robbed Jennie of an adult body, so petite and whisper-thin that at first I thought she was maybe 14 years old instead of a young woman in her 20s. Jennie and Selena came to St. Louis to wait for lungs, and after a long, hard wait, they were rewarded with that precious gift. Jennie's transplant went very well, and for a time, we got a glimpse of a Jennie without disease. She could walk without help, could go out without an oxygen tank. Friends took her to a little town along the Mississippi with famous levee-high pies, and Jennie relished the ability to walk about the town unaided, finally free. She was going back to college, she told me. Her dream was to work in early childhood...

You never realize the perfect times when they're happening. Only once in a while, you get a little glimpse, a hint that this is one for the memory banks. Kiddo's violin teacher canceled his lesson, which gave me time to run by the store on the way home. No big. The boy went gallivanting about the neighborhood for an hour with his friends, so they can talk about boogers and superheroes, I will never know. I dug weeds out of the garden and cursed the rocks and nasty clay soil that grows nothing but junk weeds despite my best efforts. Then the boy returned - precisely on time, because he loses bike privileges if he's late - and rode in circles around the parking lot while I finished weeding the flower bed. Then I enjoyed the last of the sunset, sitting in the Adirondack chair as he played soccer with the apartment building's wall. The music rose in the deepening twilight, and when he looked over at me as Nickelback came on, I raised my hands in the awesome salute and...

I spent this evening's writing time working on a critter attack on a diner. I needed expositional backstory on the two characters I'm introducing without having a visit from the Exposition Fairy - you know, the moment when the recruiting sergeant reads the soldier's personnel file to him so they can talk about shit both of them already know. Very exciting. But I'm also limited to my main character's POV. Outside of the interludes, I intend to stay in her head the whole book. So I put her in a surveillance van with her superior officer, and he'll ask her to tell him what she sees. Her observations will be mostly correct, because that's what she does, and we'll learn about these two through her eyes. Ain't I smart? Only it doesn't work out that way. Because it's an action scene, and Sara can kibitz all she likes but she's still stuck in the van. The van is never the place to be during an operation - ask any of a hundred flunkies, fr...

...It just goes on and on my friend. The longest game in baseball history was Chicago vs. Milwaukee in 1984 at eight hours and 6 minutes. The longest game by innings was Brooklyn vs. Boston in 1920 at 26 innings, but there's an asterisk because they called it a tie when it got dark. 1920, you know. After that it's a tie: the Chicago/Milwaukee game above was 25 innings, as was St. Louis and THE METS in 1974. In 1971, a game between Oakland and California went 20 innings without a run before Oakland got a hit. In 1968, a Houston-New York game went 24 innings before seeing a run. So we didn't bust any records Saturday. Except perhaps in snark. But when Kiddo's godfather decides to show us a good time, he doesn't do it by half measures. Tom Collins is a reporter, New York native, my former partner and godfather to my son. We don't see enough of him, because he lives a whole four hours away, which is no good excuse for either of us. Long ago we arranged for...

Yeah, it's a week late. You want punctuality? I'm a writer, dangit. FRIDAY I decided in advance that I wasn't going to care about making a profit this time. This one was for the boy, and for Jenny.* We hadn't gotten into the dealers room, so I was dependent on the kindness of non-strangers anyway. The boy was excited beyond measure to stay in a hotel, go to the City Museum and have adventures in costume. As usual, we didn't get going nearly as quickly as I'd planned. The show had been going for some time when we arrived. My stuff was already set up in the marketplace, which is a brilliant idea: a room with trinkets and products set up like a shop, but you don't have to stay with your table and the show takes a percentage for the charity. Excellent. That left me free to get settled and feed the boy. I can highly recommend the Clayton Crowne Plaza. The on-site restaurant is not bad and the first I've seen in a hotel with actually reasonable prices....

Our program who art in memory HELLO be thy name. Thy operating system come, thy commands be done, at the printer as it is on the screen. Give us this day our daily data, and forgive us our I/O errors as we forgive those whose logic circuits are faulty. Lead us not into frustration and deliver us from power surges. For thine is the algorithm, the application, and the solution, looping forever and ever. Return. (c) Jeffrey Armstrong, 1985

It's STEAMPUNK WEEK at the Literary Underworld! Our featured title this week is the new addition THOMAS RILEY , a wild steampunk adventure by new LitUnd author Nick Valentino. Amidst a twenty-year war, weapons designer Thomas Riley is thrust onto the front lines when a risky alchemic experiment goes wrong, embedding a foreign soul into his wily assistant Cynthia Basset. Thomas and Cynthia are forced to join with murderous sky pirates in a deadly race to capture the only man that can undo the botched alchemy: their sworn enemy. Alexis Hart calls it "fast, furious and full of swashbuckling adventure." Reviews call it a "fantastic journey" and a great place for readers new to steampunk to explore the genre. Steampunk Week is in honor of the first annual Steamposium convention, here in St. Louis this weekend. This is a nonprofit event, a steampunk gathering that will raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. As many of you may know, a dear friend of mine died...

Jon Gibbs has an interesting poll/discussion comparing self-publishing to a demo tape. As in, it's a perfectly legitimate way to put yourself out there. I think I side with the folks who say the real "demo tape" of a novel is the ms that goes to the agent or editor, not something released to the general public. I've had my ear tugged about six times by now from people swearing that I need to self-pub on the iPad right now because that's the wave of the future. And as I've tried to explain, it very well may be. I couldn't say otherwise when none of us in traditional or new media can say what the state of our industries will be tomorrow. But as long as the publishing world considers self-publishing just this side of selling yourself on a street corner, I won't be doing it. Oh, I'll sell PDFs of short stories I'm not subbing to raise money for Relay. But I'm not self-pubbing a novel just to give myself something to sell, because it's hard...

The L.A. Times has discovered that the multi-city luxury-hotel book tour is pretty much gone. Okay, if you're King, Patterson, Rowling or Grisham, they'll pick up your hotel tab. But then, if you're one of those guys, you're a) not reading this blog, and b) you actually don't need the tour to sell four bazillion copies. For the rest of us groundlings, "tour" is a fairly malleable term. Brian Keene got a corporate sponsor to send him and his bodyguard/assistant across the country in a van. The folks cited in the linked article couch-surfed their way across the country on four new tires and a pile of McDonald's and Starbucks gift cards. Those of us with day jobs *waves hand* have a tougher deal: how do you do a book tour when you only have X number of days off work? The solution I choose is to piggyback on conventions. Cons are an efficient way to meet science fiction and horror readers, because they're already there and in the mood to hear about the...

to Joseph: I never did find the actual Center for Southern Folklore. But in my wanderings I found several historical markers and boards from them, and they were all about Memphis' rich music history. This is, of course, really great stuff and the primary reason normal people come to Memphis. I, however, was hoping for traditional folklore, for myths and legends, ghosts and river spectres… you know, the stuff I use for inspiration. :) to CelestineAngel: No room parties because there was a stated $150 fee, which means no room parties. Now, I hear there were room parties, but you had to know which door to knock on. I guess I'm not one of the cool kids, because I never heard. :) I don't mean to rip the hotel too much - the room was nice, and while they were less than accommodating for policies, it's a funky-cool Escher layout. That said, as an author I need room parties for promotional purposes… and I'd much rather relax in a room party with a drink in my hand than stan...

Sunday This is turning into the Magna Carta. I didn't really intend that. Sunday was pretty exhausting. We had to hustle out the door because the hotel absolutely refused to do extended checkout for anyone - have I mentioned I don't mind that we're leaving them next year? So I had six people to shove out the door or I got stuck with another ninety-dollar night. We packed out without too much trouble. Sara, I dressed down on the last day - I wore my black harem pants again with the red salamh kameez, because the red pants ripped. So did my hip scarf, which is pretty much DOA. We sold like gangbusters on our last day, moving the books fast. I haven't done the math yet, but I'd say we were about double what we did the year before, and on a par with our best shows of all last year. Portents are good for 2010, folks. I picked up a new author, too - Nick Valentino, with his debut steampunk novel THOMAS RILEY. It'll be added to the Literary Underworld soon, along with ...