Hello friends and blog followers, if you’re reading this you’re already in my proverbial loop, but if you are on Twitter too, I’m having a contest. When I reach 1500 Twitter followers I’ll give away two signed erotic books, one to a new follower, one to someone who helped rewteet about the contest. So if you’re on Twitter, check me out over there @ceciliatan — thanks.
21st Century Wannaf**ks?
Oh, the weirdness of the Internet.
I just got off the phone with a guy from India. (I know from the country code of his call, not just his accent.) He tells me he got my number off of Facebook. The reason my number is out there on my web page and elsewhere is so if editors should ever need to call me to offer work, they have NO EXCUSE for not contacting me. I’m very easily Google-able.
So. This guy says he is a publisher. He says it something like this. “I am a publisher. Do you write books?”
Er, yeah?
“On what subjects?” Well, I tell him I write on a lot of subjects. Erotica, science fiction, baseball history, fantasy, and so on. He asks if I’ve ever written a textbook. I say no, not specifically, but I have written nonfiction books for general audience. We go back and forth on the definition of a textbook in which it becomes clear to me he doesn’t seem to grasp what a textbook is. “You mean textbooks like for school?” Yes, I mean books used in schools. No I haven’t written books specifically for use in schools… isn’t that what you’re asking ME? (I later wonder if it is a language problem, and if all books, which are written in text, are “textbooks” for him.)
He then asks me how much I would charge for him to “put your name as editor on a book.” I pressed him about WTF does he mean by that? He says, you know, just to use my name on a book. I say no, I don’t know what he’s talking about, and that’s now how it usually works, that usually writers have to actually WRITE something to get their name on a book and get paid for it.
He then goes on to ask me a million questions about how writers get paid, like do they get royalties or what. By now I’m quite sure I should hang up, but I gamely explain that a writer usually does get royalties, and he wants to know at what rates and how they are calculated… I explain it’s sometimes on the cover price, sometimes on the net, etc…
Then he wants to know how much I would charge to write a 250 page book for him. I said it would depend on the subject , but that I would expect a $25,000 advance against royalties before I’d start writing. He asks me what I am working on right now. I explain that the books I am working on now are already under contract to other publishers.
He then asks me if I have any “scripts” lying around not yet published. “Manuscripts?” I ask. He doesn’t seem to realize that a script and a manuscript are two different things.
I tell him I don’t have any manuscripts lying around, but that if he has a business proposal for me, he should email me or send me a Facebook message.
He then says, “You are very beautiful.”
At which point I shouted GOODBYE into the phone and hung up. My conclusion: horny wankers will do anything possible to get/keep a pretty girl on the phone.
Harry Potter convention in the UK in 2011!
This is no doubt motivated by the fact that I really really MISSED MY HARRY POTTER PEEPS SO MUCH since I couldn’t be at Infinitus, as well as how many fabulous things I heard about Sectus when it happened in the UK… but I just bought my registration to DiaCon Alley.
It’s a Harry Potter convention happening in Canterbury in the UK, at the University of Kent, so it’s quite affordable, it seems! I just paid for my room, registration, ball ticket, and a T-shirt and it came to a total of $267 in US dollars. The rooms are at the university and include breakfast! And the registration includes a ticket to a special fan-only showing of the final installment of the HP films.
On top of that, it appears from looking at the con website that a couple of my favorite people in fandom (including
Also, a 5 pound early bird discount applies if you register before July 21st, so I jumped on it.
For more info or to register: http://www.diacon-alley.co.uk/
I’m planning on going to Ascendio, too, but it isn’t until 2012!
Edit: They also have a Livejournal community, for those on LJ: http://community.livejournal.com/diacon_alley/
Launch Pad Diary #5
Friday July 16, 2010 4:15 pm
I had the intention to blog about Launch Pad every night before going to bed, but we’ve spent so much time looking at the night sky, both with and without “official” supervision, and my brain has been so super-heated from all the astronomy, physics, math, space science, and so on, that I’m not even close to processing all that I’ve been taking in. I’ve been taking notes like mad, but trying to turn what we’ve learned into daily summaries has turned out to be beyond my abilities. (Rachel Swirsky, on the other hand, has been doing a great job of liveblogging the whole shebang for Jeff Vandermeer’s blog, here: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/tags/read/nonfiction/launch-pad/).
Our experiences have included not only nightly star staring, but also a nature hike of the Turtle Rock Trail in Vedauwoo State Park. Continue reading →
Launch Pad Diary #4: Photos
Our schedule has been so packed I didn’t have time to blog yesterday, so here’s some photos instead! Dorms, geeks, telescopes, and spectroscopy!
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| From Launch Pad 2010 photos |
Me at the small telescope on the physical science building on campus.
Launchpad Diary #3: In which we see stars
Tuesday, July 13, 12:13 am
End of the very first full day at Launchpad. We were in the classroom for nine hours today, including breaks for lunch and snacking. Each one of the three main lecturers delivered a session, and I’ve decided it’s fruitless for me to try to reproduce what they say. My notes are copious and I will be saving up the very best bits for some summary posts and lists for both my own blog and io9. So I promise more science soon, but in a more digested form.
One thing we learned today, though, is that there are five types of space exploration:
1. Ground-based observation
2. Fly by missions
3. Orbiting missions
4. In situ crafts — landers, rovers, and things that “land” in/on what’s not land
5. Human exploration
Tonight we indulged in method #5 to find dinner, Continue reading →
Launch Pad Post #2: just hanging out
July 11, 2010 4:28 pm (Mountain Time)
We’ve arrived at the campus of University of Wyoming. Three of us were all on the same flight from Boston so we were picked up together, and also met one of the other participants, Ian Randal Strock (whom I’ve known for years from science fiction conventions), and also Mike Brotherton, the main man as far as Launch Pad is concerned. Ian and Mike were waiting for the next people to arrive, while Jeremiah, who is somewhat local (Fort Collins, CO) drove the other three of us.
The drive from Denver is about two hours, up the front range. My car companions were Genevieve and John, both from New York but flying from Boston because they were at Readercon. We city folk were treated to the view of many cows, geologic formations, and perhaps the most novel sight of all: 360 degrees of horizon. We saw an antelope, which Jeremy pointed out are native to here (“where the deer and the antelope play”) and drove along rock formations that looked like the spine of a giant dinosaur running along the ridge of its back.
Continue reading →
Launch Pad Diary #1
Launch Pad Diary
July 11, 2010 8:27 am
Here I am in another airport, starting another travelogue. In previous adventures, I’ve traveled to exotic lands, or to Florida. This time I might go to the moon, though, or other stars. I’m on my way to the Launch Pad Writers Workshop at University of Wyoming.
The concept of the workshop is pretty simple. Teach real space science to science fiction writers and editors so that they’ll get it right, and promulgate real exciting science to the public (rather than the dumb rubber “science” too often found in sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows). NASA funds the program, though it’s a helluva lot cheaper to send a writer like me to Wyoming on Jetblue than to send an astronaut to orbit.
Continue reading →
Readercon Report #2: States of Consciousness talk by Eric Van
Eric handed out a list of Natural States of Consciousness and Neurochemicals (transcribed below)
He was surprised by how many people showed up at dinner time and didn’t make enough handouts, but I typed it up below.
Eric: Normal psychology is very good at discounting and throwing away anything that isn’t a “normal” state of consciousness. My own visual processing is 3 standard deviations worse than normal.
If you tested Steven Pinker and me and a chimp on that, you would think I was the chimp.
Sophomores who take introductory psych, they throw away the outliers.
I thought they should save all the outliers and save all the data from study to study.
What if you found out that there was a correlation (or causitive) that deviation in vision a correlated with high creativity.
So I figured it would be a good idea to tap into the outliers among the science fiction community.
Readercon report #1: Alternatives to the Pay Per Copy System of Author Compensation
This was one program item I really wanted to see, so I made sure to get to the con on time for it.
Official Description:
Alternatives to the Pay-Per-Copy System of Author Compensation.
Mary Robinette Kowal, Barbara Krasnoff, Eugene Mirabelli, Ken Schneyer (L), Charles Stross.
Paying writers or publishers for each copy of the work sold is a system that developed in response to the invention of the printing press. Now that physical copies are no longer necessary, and may no longer be the most convenient or popular means of consuming literature, what method of compensation or revenue generation should be attempted? A donation system? A system of teasers, where the reader pays to see the remainder of the work? A “membership” system, in which paid members get special access to drafts or extra materials? A “service” system? Or does the end of traditional print copyright mean the end of fairly‐compensated authors?
I had to laugh when I read the description of this panel, in particular the last bit about fairly-compensated author, because the vast majority of writers under our current system of publishing and royalties are NOT CLOSE to being compensated fairly, and writers earnings have been on a steady decline since the 1940s. So anyone who is clinging to our current modes of 5% royalties on mass market paperbacks is probably someone who is selling in the millions of books (or is the publisher who pays them).
A note on my perspective. I’ve been working as both a professional writer and as an employee of trade book publishers for twenty years. I’ve seen it from both sides. The company I own, Circlet Press, has been on a long, uphill struggle to sell enough books to pay both our authors and our printers (I haven’t paid myself for Circlet work in close to 15 years). In the past 3 years I have seen both my print freelance work dry up and ebook publishing become one of my only steady outlets for my own writing, while Circlet has gone from being a money-losing traditional print publisher to a growing cash-flow-positive ebook and “digital first” publisher. So the digital revolution has affected me in every aspect of my business.
What follows is pretty much a verbatim transcript of the discussion with some paraphrasing and some of the repetitious asides left out:
Continue reading →
