Sarah Monette's Blog, page 31

5 things

1. The ebook of Somewhere Beneath Those Waves is available from Weightless Books.

2. Apex 31 includes my Booth story, "The Yellow Dressing Gown" (originally published in Weird Tales by the fabulous Ann Vandermeer).

3. Over on the Whatever, John Scalzi is hosting threads for authors to promote their own works as holiday gifts. If you're looking for ideas, I commend the Whatever Shopping Guide 2011 to you.

4. The pictures of these African Sulcata tortoises and their progeny fill me with delight.

5. We are still worried about our Jellicle Ninja. Good thoughts appreciated.

How to Help an Author's Career

Back when my career with Ace went belly up, a number of people asked what they could do to help. At the time, although I desperately appreciated the support, I didn't know what to say--and in any event, at that juncture the horse was already over the hill and far away and there was no point to mending the barn door. But now, I've got books out again, and I SWEAR TO GOD I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS NOVEL, and I have a couple things I've learned that readers can do to help any author's career.

1. Buy their books.
I know this looks obvious, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. If you like the author, buy their books. Or ask your local library (or libraries) to buy their books. And--and this is important--if they're writing a series, don't wait until the series is complete to buy their books . I understand the logic from the reader's end, but the problem is that publishers can't tell the difference between going to buy the book when the series is complete and not going to buy the book. It all looks the same in the sales figures for Book I. Which means that if you wait to buy Book I until Book V is out, odds are good that (a.) Book I won't be in print anymore and (b.), even worse, Book V may never get published at all. Buy the books when they're new, even if you don't read them right away. This benefits the author, whose numbers look better; this benefits the publisher, who is, hey, selling books; and in turn this benefits the reader, because Book V will get published after all.

2. Talk about their books.
This also looks obvious, but it also bears repeating. Because, actually, the one thing we know about how book-buying works is that it works best by word-of-mouth. People buy books because they hear other people (friends, relatives, bloggers, two guys on the bus, whatever) talking about them. So if you like a book, tell your friends. If you have a blog, blog about it. Share your enthusiasm. I don't mean this in a scary you-must-drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of way, and I'm certainly not saying that everyone who reads this must go out and proselytize MY books. But if you like an author enough that you want to help them keep authoring, spread the word. Give their books as gifts, even--which loops neatly back to Rule 1 and makes this a good place to end this post.

If you want to help an author's career, this is what I know about doing it.

5 good things

1. The Jellicle Ninja is doing much better. Thank you for all your kind wishes!
2. Brit Mandelo has reviewed Somewhere Beneath Those Waves for Tor.com
3. Apex Magazine will be reprinting "The Yellow Dressing Gown" in their 31st issue.
4. I still like my job as a database thrall.
5. The horse continues to be a good horse. A goofy, exasperating horse, but a good horse nonetheless.

Please think good thoughts for our Jellicle Ninja, who is...

Please think good thoughts for our Jellicle Ninja, who is spending Thanksgiving at the vet's, getting IV fluids because her kidney numbers have gone wonky.

5 things

1. My trip to Boston in a nutshell. (In case you can't tell, the chained up books in the MITSFS library are the Gor novels.) There was also a great deal of Giant Ridiculous Dog, of which I totally approve.

2. Despite the fact that I really liked the Star Trek reboot, kateelliott has come up with something that would have been SO MUCH MORE AWESOME ZOMG THERE ARE NO WORDS.

3. A brief resurgence of Q&A, since somebody had questions:
(a.) Is there any hope of you writing another Labyrinth book?
Another book is unlikely, unless the clouds open up and the angels descend and I am struck by an idea of such IRRESISTABLE GENIUS that there is clearly no other choice. But I do intend to write a novella about Cardenio Richey and Vey Coruscant's copy of the Principia Caeli and a Jack the Ripper analogue called Jean-the-Knife. The title is Yes, No, Always, Never, and it's in the list of things I'm gonna get to Real Soon Now.

(b.) Secondly, I was kind of expecting for Felix and Kay to wind up together. Am I completely off base?
No, you're not. That was what originally happened, in the very bad and embarrassing draft that I wrote when I was paying more attention to the deadline than to what the book (and the characters) needed.

4. elisem has written a Lovecraftian hymn, for which she blames me.

I'm cool with that.

5. My introvert meter has expired and I'm out of quarters. Good night, internets.

Okay, seriously, meat? SERIOUSLY?

So, today mirrorthaw and I spent way more of our Saturday than either of us had intended in various healthcare institutions, determining that what I have is NOT a blood clot in my right leg. It is a Baker's cyst. Which is good news (no blood clot = YAY!), but is in itself annoying and painful and about all there is to do about it is wait for it to go away.

My body thinks it has a sense of humor, but it's wrong.

!UBC plus 4 other things

First! Publishers Weekly gives Somewhere Beneath Those Waves a starred review. (OMG ELEVENTY-ONE!!!1!1!)


!UBC:
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

I had to stop reading this book on page 125 because all it was doing was making me angry. It wasn't so much the weird semi-covert Hitler rehabilitation as it was the way that Lukacs made his arguments by ignoring half the facts. For instance, in talking about the Röhm "putsch,"* he conveniently forgets to mention that THERE WAS NO PUTSCH, making it sound as if the murder of the SA leaders was in response to an actual attempted coup instead of in response to an on-going, dangerous, but relatively inchoate political inconvenience. He exhibits the "extraordinary popular outpouring of support" of the Nazi Winterhilfe charity (98) without mentioning the fact that support for Winterhilfe was pretty darn near compulsory in an Orwellian neighbors-policing-neighbors way. And that's his method, over and over and over again. He selects the half of the facts that make Hitler look better and ignores the rest. Also, although he footnotes like a fiend, he doesn't footnote properly, so that when he says, for instance, "From 1932 to 1939, the number of suicides committed by Germans under twenty dropped 80 percent during the first six years of the Hitler regime (from 1,212 in 1931 to 290 in 1939)" (98), he doesn't footnote it. He doesn't say where he got the information, how "suicide" is being defined, or whether--as just another random example of how partial and misleading this statistic is--"Germans under twenty" includes German Jews or not.

(I also find Lukacs' politics personally off-putting, but I'd be able to put up with that if only his history was worthy of respect.)

And I'm doubly disappointed because I would really like to read a book that does what Lukacs purports to be doing--comparing and analyzing the biographies of Hitler written in the last 50 years. That's a meta-discussion I very badly want someone to provide for me, but this book isn't it.

---
*Die Nacht der longen Messer, the Night of the Long Knives: because there's nothing more quintessentially Nazi than this romantic name for a bloodbath--die Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, is another perfect example. (Wikipedia has a picture of a destroyed synagogue which is horribly compelling.)


Fountain pen geeks, what do you think about Pelikan inks, particularly the ones available in cartridges? I have been very disappointed in the royal blue, which is a nice enough color but fades horribly--and since I want my inks dark and vivid, this drives me nuts. Should I try any of the others, or should I just give in to my own geekiness and take a bottle of Noodler's Squeteague to live in my desk at work?


A reminder: matociquala and I will be reading at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge MA at 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 19. Free and open to the public, so please come out!


And, for a fifth thing and happy Friday, have some lovely pictures of wet fishing cat kittens

podcast

I did a podcast interview with Julia Rios at the Outer Alliance about The Bone Key (available in its shiny new edition here from Prime Books): podcast here.

UBC: Lying About Hitler

Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books-Perseus Books Group, 2001.


Like The Case for Auschwitz , this is a book written by an expert witness for the defense in the libel suit David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. In this case, the expert witness is the historian: Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University; his role in the defense was to assess Irving as a historian.

His findings, briefly stated, are that Irving manipulated and misrepresented historical facts and primary sources from the very beginning of his career, and always twisting in favor of Nazi Germany and against the Allies. He goes into some detail in his discussion, but as far as I was concerned, not nearly enough. I don't care particularly about the confusion in the media about who was on trial (many commentators thought that the trial was about Irving being denied free speech) or about Evans' experience of being cross-examined by Irving--which is not to say that wasn't a nightmare, because it totally was; it's just that what I want is the process by which Evans and his research assistants retraced Irving's steps and dissected his twisting of evidence.

That's a personal bias. Leaving it aside, this is a perfectly good book; eleven years after the trial, it's not particularly illuminating--and actually, I think that is because Evans doesn't go through his 700 page expert opinion and lay out everything he discovered about Irving's quote-unquote "historiography." This is a popular book about the Irving trial--in the sense that it is written for a "popular," i.e., casual audience, and as such, it's much more ephemeral than van Pelt's book, which is partly about the trial, but mostly about the evidence, and which is written for an assumed audience that wants all the minutiae and neepery. That audience would be me. I'm never satisfied with books that only give me the surface of their topic; what I want, always, is the gears and vital organs underneath. Evans gives me some of that, but left me twitching and hungry for more.

When we last saw our heroes . . .

So, yes, I'm still here. Just not on the internets hardly at all.


Also, however, and unfortunately, more health problems have been cropping up this autumn. I have a Morton's neuroma in my right foot, which is probably related to the Great Ankle Debacle of 2010. Walking barefoot is right out (if you know me, you understand how appalling this is: I hate shoes), and walking long distances is contraindicated--and bang goes my most reliable and consistent source of exercise, walking and hiking with mirrorthaw . I'm investigating physical therapy options before committing to surgery, since it is almost certain that the neuroma is exacerbated, if not caused, by my stiff Achilles tendon and Peronaei muscles; the physical therapist, whom I saw for the first time today, is optimistic that they can do things to help.

And then there's the irritable bowel syndrome, also a new development, about which the less said the better.

So I'm probably just not going to be blogging very much for a while. As I said, I hope this will change.
But while I'm here, I should mention that matociquala and I will be doing a signing (which I just mistyped "singing," and honestly? that's not impossible) as part of Pandemonium Books' 22nd anniversary celebration on November 19th (their website says the 18th, but that's the Friday and the signing is on Saturday). If you happen to be in the Boston area, you should totally come out for it.