Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 4

on self-publishing

Mitch, a lot of people turn to self-publishing in response to the vast silence from New York.  That doesn't mean you won't be famous some day, so you'd better brace yourself for eventually becoming rich, or providing riches for future obscure relatives.

Stephen Crane self-published his first novel, which he then had to burn in his wood stove one copy at a time, to stay warm in the winter of 1894.

(Worth $8500 now.)

In another couple of years he was famous, for the rest of his short life.  Don’t emulate him!  Be like me and publish your stuff in pulp sf magazines.  Nor doubt that fame and fortune lie beyond the bourne!

Joe

propositional calculus?

An old friend wrote with a familiar question:  I've written a book.  Should I just send it to a publisher, or is it smarter to send it to an agent?

Steve, times have changed radically from when I was sending out stories and book proposals.  We used to look in Writer's Market and check out the listings, and choose a publisher/editor more or less at random -- someone who does books you admire -- and shoot off the manuscript with a self-addressed stamped envelope to one of them.  Then when it came back, send it to the next one on the list.

Nowadays, people look at the agents' listings instead.  Agents publish lists of the writers they represent.  You look for an agent who does writers you like, and send your story or proposal off to him or her.

One thing apparently is the same:  an agent who's any good doesn't have lots of spare time to read manuscripts.  So it's best to write up a killer proposal, rather than send the whole book.

The supposition (which is only sometimes true) is that if you can write a wonderful proposal, you will write a wonderfuller book.

Of course it's really just a sales job, and the reality is that Hemingway or Joyce or Faulkner would probably be crap at writing a sales pitch.  But what does reality have to do with it? 

I have a book at home (we're on the road now) that is a compilation of query letters that worked.  Googling turns up a half-dozen possibilities.

The proposals I've done that worked were either short, a couple of paragraphs, or very long -- pages of detail.  So who knows?

(I think my most successful proposal was for Forever Free.  Five words:  "A sequel to The Forever War."  But first you have to write a best-seller.)

Good luck.

various rockets' red glare

Fingers crossed for the Juno spacecraft.  Jupiter's my favorite planet anyhow.  This mission will take thousands of high-resolution photos of its interesting "surface" -- cloud-tops, anyhow.

As a lad I spent hour after hour trying to draw my low-resolution versions of the same.  It was the most rewarding of all the planets to draw, with a relatively small telescope.

Yesterday we went into Chevy Chase -- or was it Bethesda? -- and treated ourselves to pedicures.  My nails were becoming dangerous weapons!  Careful and serious small Vietnamese woman.

Also picked up a bucket of fried chicken from sister Wendi's favorite place, very yum.  We went to the vegetable market and picked up this and that.  I prepared a pot of greens therefrom, with bacon and onion, likewise yum.

Today being the 4th of July, we'll have to plan carefully to work around celebrations.  In the evening we'll probably just walk to a nearby field with a picnic, and watch the Washington display, which will of course be prodigious.  These old bones don't look forward to reclining on the ground, but I'll manage.

Joe

Can you find the time?

I need a program that will tell me the positions of the inner planets on a given day in the 21st century.  Specifically, I have people on the Earth and Luna, in cislunar space, and enroute to Mars.  The distances between them can be as small as fractional light-seconds and as great as light-minutes.  Putting aside for a minute the writing challenge of relating a conversation among several people with varying time delays -- does NASA or anybody have a program that will output those distances (or just positions) at a given moment?  Or is it computationally more difficult than it looks?

on gender in The Forever War

This is in answer to a letter from a reader . . . .
Actually, I should be content to just let the text stay, and explain itself, but there's a lot that was more clear forty years ago than now -- and wasn't completely clear to everybody then. 

The ideas of, first, compulsory sex among soldiers and, later, compulsory homosexuality among everybody, were meant to be tongue-in-cheek; absurd.  That I employed the rhetorical devices of hard sf to that end was supposed to be the big McGuffin, if you will.  If people didn't think it was funny . . . well, as they say in literary criticism, fuck them if they can't take a joke!

Does that mean that the novel was not intended seriously?  No.  But one could write a book -- a deadly boring one -- about what seriousness means in a comic novel.  (Using "comic" in its broadest literary sense.) 

What I would probably do differently now, maybe because I'm becoming politically correct in my old age, would be the feminization of a couple of the gay male characters, and masculinization of a couple of the female ones.  That wasn't necessary then and would be doubly unnecessary now.  (A couple of gay readers did take me to task for that even back then.)

beach bum (sans beach)

We're spending a few days in Ocean City, Maryland, with Gay's sister Wendi and niece Joanne.  Nice little room in a hotel I would judge to be slightly less than a hundred years old.  Must check.

It's far enough from the beach to be quiet and relatively inexpensive.  A pleasant unprepossessing dining room.  Good local seafood.  Soft overstuffed beds, modern capsule coffee machines.  One could write a book here.

Yesterday Kevin (Joanne's husband) and I girded our loins and braved the funhouse.  Loin-girding not actually required.  Rode a bumpy car through the darkness, with occasional painted denizens leaping out screaming or laughing maniacally.  I think that scared the shit out of me seventy years ago.  But I'm made of sterner stuff now.  Mainly scared of catching something from touching the groady old thing.

Gay and Wendi and Joanne rode the Ferris Wheel.  My courage does not extend to tempting the gods of gravity, so I just watched them and listened for their screams.

We walked down the boardwalk, which was bright and loud but a little, or more than a little, tawdry -- which was surely true seventy years ago, too.  We indulged in candied peanuts and popcorn, and saltwater taffy,and Thraser's french fries, as one must.  I was concerned about diabetes, and so decided not to test my blood sugar.  Too high a number and I might have a heart attack.

The girls seem younger and heavier than the variety attracted to Daytona and Ormond Beach.  Well, I guess the  population is not statistically weighted with college girls.  More like dietetically weighted by prepubescent candy munchers.  One must be patient.  They will slim down long enough to catch a man.  And I will be watching, as I have been for the past sixty-some years, as they move into and out of my ken.

One thing that slightly bothers me (which did not when I was twelve or thirteen) is the absolute absence of nature, other than the slim blue line of ocean near the horizon.  This hotel must be nearly a mile from the actual beach.  So we do have a salt breeze, but we can't easily stroll to the strand.  We can drive thirty miles or so south and park in a coin-operated lot.  From the boardwalk you can walk a few hundred yards to the sea, picking your way between blankets and broasting tourists, and there test your swimming ability and patience.  I haven't been tempted.  But then I do limit myself to one shark encounter per ten years.  (The Google article says there haven't been any shark fatalities here "in recent years," which is not specific enough to reassure me.)

Of course as a Florida native, I know that meteorites kill more people than sharks.  But then I wear a tinfoil helmet, too, just in case.

Joe

however . . .

Upon investigation, I found this --


"The numerical value of fucknut in Chaldean Numerology is: 7"


. . . which gives the whole enterprise a certain level of legitimacy.


Joe

not your favorite word

For some reason I looked up the word "fucknugget," I guess because I thought it might come in handy socially.  That generated a response in a program called wordnik, which supplied this unexpected cascade of information --Stats‘"fucknugget:’ has been looked up 407 times, is no one's favorite word yet, has been added to 2 lists, has no comments yet, and is not a valid Scrabble word.I'm a little disappointed that it's no one's favorite word.  I shall try to use it in conversation at least once today.  Or perhaps use it to test the daringness of people in a Scrabble game.  (And then try "daringness.")

Joe

a gentleman writer's accessory

My world will be happier if I can write a couple of pages.  A foundation for work on the road.  But I guess the best strategy is just to write on as if there were no travel obstacles ahead, and then, whilst traveling, pretend you’re comfortably at home. 

Well, I do have four fountain pens sitting here waiting to serve me.  Get all my notes together and attack!

Of course the peripatetic writer should be at home everywhere.  I love the portable offices, writing boxes, that Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen carried on their travels.  Word processors of the times.  How much harder that must have been -- trying to use a dip pen in a lurching carriage while maintaining a long train of thought might have been useful mental discipline.  The lap desk wobbling on your lap.

Here’s my “lap desk,” which I haven’t really used since I was writing novels in the back seat of a Volkswagen bus, back in the eighties.  I had built in a drop-down desk attached to the back of the passenger seat, so I could sit on the cooler and type or jot.  Even then I normally did my first drafts with a pen.  Then, ideally, an intermediate typed draft, perhaps red-penciled before the final draft, typed by someone else.  (Someone who can actually type -- I'm awful.)

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I do still sometimes use the lap desk as if it were the seventeenth century.  Perhaps for the same reason that I still use a fountain pen, when you can get four biros for a buck.

Long post about Pepys

(Long message warning)

I’ve been following Samuel Pepys’s diary for some time.  Today there was a long disquisition on coinage, which might be boring to most people, but I found it fascinating.  Pepys didn’t have any special mechanical or scientific training, but he was a careful observer, and interested in everything:


Tuesday 19 May 1663

Up pretty betimes, but yet I observe how my dancing and lying a morning or two longer than ordinary for my cold do make me hard to rise as I used to do, or look after my business as I am wont.

To my chamber to make an end of my papers to my father to be sent by the post to-night, and taking copies of them, which was a great work, but I did it this morning, and so to my office, and thence with Sir John Minnes to the Tower; and by Mr. Slingsby, and Mr. Howard, Controller of the Mint, we were shown the method of making this new money, from the beginning to the end, which is so pretty that I did take a note of every part of it and set them down by themselves for my remembrance hereafter. That being done it was dinner time, and so the Controller would have us dine with him and his company, the King giving them a dinner every day. And very merry and good discourse about the business we have been upon, and after dinner went to the Assay Office and there saw the manner of assaying of gold and silver, and how silver melted down with gold do part, just being put into aqua-fortis, the silver turning into water, and the gold lying whole in the very form it was put in, mixed of gold and silver, which is a miracle; and to see no silver at all but turned into water, which they can bring again into itself out of the water. —[Not water — a solution of Silver Oxide. D.W.]—

And here I was made thoroughly to understand the business of the fineness and coarseness of metals, and have put down my lessons with my other observations therein.

At table among other discourse they told us of two cheats, the best I ever heard. One, of a labourer discovered to convey away the bits of silver cut out pence by swallowing them down into his belly, and so they could not find him out, though, of course, they searched all the labourers; but, having reason to doubt him, they did, by threats and promises, get him to confess, and did find 7l. of it in his house at one time.

The other of one that got a way of coyning money as good and passable and large as the true money is, and yet saved fifty per cent. to himself, which was by getting moulds made to stamp groats like old groats, which is done so well, and I did beg two of them which I keep for rarities, that there is not better in the world, and is as good, nay, better than those that commonly go, which was the only thing that they could find out to doubt them by, besides the number that the party do go to put off, and then coming to the Comptroller of the Mint, he could not, I say, find out any other thing to raise any doubt upon, but only their being so truly round or near it, though I should never have doubted the thing neither. He was neither hanged nor burned, —[No! They probably copied his technique. D.W.]— the cheat was thought so ingenious, and being the first time they could ever trap him in it, and so little hurt to any man in it, the money being as good as commonly goes.
Thence to the office till the evening, we sat, and then by water (taking Pembleton with us), over the water to the Halfway House, where we played at ninepins, and there my damned jealousy took fire, he and my wife being of a side and I seeing of him take her by the hand in play, though I now believe he did [it] only in passing and sport. Thence home and being 10 o’clock was forced to land beyond the Custom House, and so walked home and to my office, and having dispatched my great letters by the post to my father, of which I keep copies to show by me and for my future understanding, I went home to supper and bed, being late.

The most observables in the making of money which I observed to-day, is the steps of their doing it.

1       Before they do anything they assay the bullion, which is done, if it be gold, by taking an equal weight of that and of silver, of each a small weight, which they reckon to be six ounces or half a pound troy; this they wrap up in within lead.
If it be silver, they put such a quantity of that alone and wrap it up in lead, and then putting them into little earthen cupps made of stuff like tobacco pipes, and put them into a burning hot furnace, where, after a while, the whole body is melted, and at last the lead in both is sunk into the body of the cupp, which carries away all the copper or dross with it, and left the pure gold and silver embodyed together, of that which hath both been put into the cupp together, and the silver alone in these where it was put alone in the leaden case. And to part the silver and the gold in the first experiment, they put the mixed body into a glass of aqua-fortis, which separates them by spitting out the silver into such small parts that you cannot tell what it becomes, but turns into the very water and leaves the gold at the bottom clear of itself, with the silver wholly spit out, and yet the gold in the form that it was doubled together in when it was a mixed body of gold and silver, which is a great mystery; and after all this is done to get the silver together out of the water is as strange.
But the nature of the assay is thus: the piece of gold that goes into the furnace twelve ounces, if it comes out again eleven ounces, and the piece of silver which goes in twelve and comes out again eleven and two pennyweight, are just of the alloy of the standard of England. If it comes out, either of them, either the gold above eleven, as very fine will sometimes within very little of what it went in, or the silver above eleven and two pennyweight, as that also will sometimes come out eleven and ten penny weight or more, they are so much above the goodness of the standard, and so they know what proportion of worse gold and silver to put to such a quantity of the bullion to bring it to the exact standard. And on the contrary, [if] it comes out lighter, then such a weight is beneath the standard, and so requires such a proportion of fine metal to be put to the bullion to bring it to the standard, and this is the difference of good and bad, better and worse than the standard, and also the difference of standards, that of Seville being the best and that of Mexico worst, and I think they said none but Seville is better than ours.
2       They melt it into long plates, which, if the mould do take ayre, then the plate is not of an equal heaviness in every part of it, as it often falls out.
3       They draw these plates between rollers to bring them to an even thickness all along and every plate of the same thickness, and it is very strange how the drawing it twice easily between the rollers will make it as hot as fire, yet cannot touch it. —[Many principles of Physics had not yet then been deliniated. D.W.]—
4       They bring it to another pair of rollers, which they call adjusting it, which bring it to a greater exactness in its thickness than the first could be.
5       They cut them into round pieces, which they do with the greatest ease, speed, and exactness in the world.
6       They weigh these, and where they find any to be too heavy they file them, which they call sizeing them; or light, they lay them by, which is very seldom, but they are of a most exact weight, but however, in the melting, all parts by some accident not being close alike, now and then a difference will be, and, this filing being done, there shall not be any imaginable difference almost between the weight of forty of these against another forty chosen by chance out of all their heaps.
7       These round pieces having been cut out of the plates, which in passing the rollers are bent, they are sometimes a little crooked or swelling out or sinking in, and therefore they have a way of clapping 100 or 2 together into an engine, which with a screw presses them so hard that they come out as flat as is possible.
8       They blanch them.
9       They mark the letters on the edges, which is kept as the great secret by Blondeau, who was not in the way, and so I did not speak with him to-day.1
10   They mill them, that is, put on the marks on both sides at once with great exactness and speed, and then the money is perfect.
The mill is after this manner: one of the dyes, which has one side of the piece cut, is fastened to a thing fixed below, and the other dye (and they tell me a payre of dyes will last the marking of 10,000l. before it be worn out, they and all other their tools being made of hardened steel, and the Dutchman who makes them is an admirable artist, and has so much by the pound for every pound that is coyned to find a constant supply of dyes) to an engine above, which is moveable by a screw, which is pulled by men; and then a piece being clapped by one sitting below between the two dyes, when they meet the impression is set, and then the man with his finger strikes off the piece and claps another in, and then the other men they pull again and that is marked, and then another and another with great speed.
11  
They say that this way is more charge to the King than the old way, but it is neater, freer from clipping or counterfeiting, the putting of the words upon the edges being not to be done (though counterfeited) without an engine of the charge and noise that no counterfeit will be at or venture upon, and it employs as many men as the old and speedier.
They now coyne between 16l. and 24,000l. in a week.

At dinner they did discourse very finely to us of the probability that there is a vast deal of money hid in the land, from this:—
That in King Charles’s time there was near ten millions of money coyned, besides what was then in being of King James’s and Queene Elizabeth’s, of which there is a good deal at this day in being.

Next, that there was but 750,000l. coyned of the Harp and Crosse money, and of this there was 500,000l. brought in upon its being called in. And from very good arguments they find that there cannot be less of it in Ireland and Scotland than 100,000l.; so that there is but 150,000l. missing; and of that, suppose that there should be not above 650,000 still remaining, either melted down, hid, or lost, or hoarded up in England, there will then be but 100,000l. left to be thought to have been transported.

Now, if 750,000l. in twelve years’ time lost but a 100,000l. in danger of being transported, then within thirty-five years’ time will have lost but 3,888,880l. and odd pounds; and as there is 650,000l. remaining after twelve years’ time in England, so after thirty-five years’ time, which was within this two years, there ought in proportion to have been resting 6,111,120l. or thereabouts, beside King James’s and Queen Elizabeth’s money.

Now that most of this must be hid is evident, as they reckon, because of the dearth of money immediately upon the calling-in of the State’s money, which was 500,000l. that came in; and yet there was not any money to be had in this City, which they say to their own observation and knowledge was so. And therefore, though I can say nothing in it myself, I do not dispute it.