Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 155

SELENE Ebook Release!

Yes, you read that right–Selene is now available in ebook form!

Life isn’t easy for a sexwitch. Even your own body betrays you. It’s bad enough that Selene is part slave to Nikolai, the Prime Power of Saint City, but she’s got her brother Danny and she’s got her job at the college. In the postwar wreckage of an uncertain world, it’s pretty much all she’s ever allowed herself to want.

Then Danny ends up murdered, and Selene finds herself a pawn in a dangerous game. Indentured to a bloodsucking Nichtvren and helpless, told to stop trying to uncover the identity of her brother’s killer, Selene has nowhere to turn. If she’s a good girl, Nikolai will leave her a little bit of freedom. He’ll take care of her, and she’ll be safe–if she obeys.

But Selene hasn’t survived this long by being obedient to her cursed powers, or to the men who buy her time. Her brother was all she had, and now she’s ready to borrow, beg, lie, steal or kill–whatever it takes to avenge him.

And if Nikolai gets in the way, Selene will use every tool in her arsenal to make him regret it…

This ebook edition includes the prequel novella Brother’s Keeper AND the short story Just Ask, which deals with Selene’s return to Saint City. It’s offered for an introductory price now, and later will go on Smashwords for preorder/distribution for a wee bit more. So get it now while it’s discounted!

For those asking, yes, there will be a paper copy eventually, if the ebook does well.

Thanks are due to Skyla Dawn Cameron and Brian White for helping me put the whole thing together–and, last but not least, to you, my dear Reader, for refusing to let the Nichtvren die. Thank you so, so much.

ETA 22/03/2014: After some issues with the shop, we’ve switched to a different cart system. If you’ve already bought the book and didn’t get access, please let us know. If you haven’t purchased yet, head here to do so. Drop our technical support a line if there’s a problem, and we’ll be happy to help!

Thank you for your patience while we iron out the kinks!

Success Is Process

Yesterday I finished the zero draft of Agent Zero, otherwise known as “the spy and the waitress that I wrote for Mel Sterling thing.” Consequently my brain feels like Swiss cheese right now, and runny Swiss cheese at that. Nevertheless, the new project–Rattlesnake Wind, a YA that probably won’t ever see publication–is burning a hole in me. So there’s that, aching to come out, but I have promised myself today off.

A lot of you are asking why Wayfarer isn’t out in hardback. The publisher made that decision based on the numbers for Nameless. They didn’t make enough money to justify bringing Ellie’s story out in hardback. I’m sorry–you can’t know how sorry–but it’s one of those things I have absolutely no control over. If you’d like to see a hardback, please let the publisher know. As it is, I’m not even sure Ruby’s story will make it into print, because the numbers just aren’t there. Which is part of my decision to leave YA for a while. I don’t think anyone will pick up Rattlesnake Wind or the sci-fi YA I was working on, Reader’s Shadow. It appears I’m not “mainstream” enough, whatever that means.

Which is okay.

I’m shifting back over to romance for a bit, because there’s stories I want to tell there now–like Agent Zero, and another Watcher book, and we’ll see what else. And let’s not forget Jeremy Gallow, which will take the place of the Bannon & Clare books. (DON’T WORRY–The Ripper Affair is still coming out, it’s just the last B&C for a while.) I’m excited about Gallow, because I have been thinking about him and his story for YEARS now. And frankly stepping away from the really intense work a YA represents gives me time to write some things I really, really want to. Like the cyberpunk Western serial for Fireside, or the Night’s Mother book, or the Storm Queen cycle. Not to mention doing things like bringing out the Selene ebook (we’re int he very last stages, I promise) and maybe re-editing and finishing the Keepers trilogy.

Of course, hitting this stage in my career where the publishers tell me “these just aren’t making enough money” has set off a crisis of confidence. I am, after all, human. (Shhh! Don’t let it get out, I have a reputation to maintain.) My agent assures me I’m not circling the drain, my beloved editor Devi at Orbit still believes in me, and I still have my Dear Readers. I’m just…a little bruised.

But that’s publishing. It’s a funny business, and “success” is not a static point. It’s an ongoing process, and I’m still comfortably midlist. On my better days I am viewing this as a chance to write in another way, to try some new things. The better days outnumber the other days, thank God.

It’s hard having to tell Readers over and over that I have no control over several things, that they’ll have to talk to the publisher. Many, many fans think that an author has a type of agency and latitude to demand things we quite simply don’t. I often feel bad because I can’t give Readers an answer other than “that’s the publisher’s call” for a lot of things; I also feel bad when the publisher says “this just isn’t selling” and my brain immediately jumps to “I HAVE FAILED, YOU TOOK A CHANCE ON ME AND I BLEW IT, OH GOD I AM SO SORRY.” The constant rejection inherent in this career (when you finish being rejected by agents you get rejected by publishers, then by reviewers, then by Amazon reviewers, you get the idea) does rob one of a certain sense of perspective.

So I’m going to watch some Wong Kar-Wai movies, and listen to some music, and do some deep breathing, and cuddle the kids and the dogs and the cats. (But not the cavies. They don’t like cuddles by HUGE MEAT THINGS THAT COULD BE PREDATORS EVEN IF THEY BRING THE FUDZ.)

And tomorrow, when I get up, I’ll be ready to shift over to Rattlesnake Wind, and make some words.

photo by:


Anonymous9000

Cyberpunk Western Serial, Anyone?

Want to know a little bit more about the cyberpunk Western serial I’ll be writing if the Fireside Year 3 Kickstarter succeeds? Sure you do! Check out this Q & A (I never know what to say in these things), and if you’re interested and can spare some change, please do.

The serial will be an extension of my short story Maternal Type, which is currently being offered for free during the Kickstarter too.

Being asked “tell me something about your life that doesn’t involve writing” usually causes me to vapour-lock, because, well, writing affects and is part of every single facet of my life. I can’t separate out an aspect of myself that isn’t intimately involved or affected by writing. So I’m never sure what to say in these situations. Mostly I just stare blankly and do a “guh?” sound.

In other news, Selene is with a proofer, and when that finishes, it will be a matter of days before the ebook is up. I’m incredibly excited, and can’t wait. I’m fidgeting even thinking about it…

photo by:


State Library of Victoria Collections

The Nature of Pliny’s World

The World He Knew

We’re approaching the edge of the suburbs now. If you look out your windows on either side, you’ll see the modern world fading bit by bit. (Except for the tracks, of course. And the train.) We are invisible to the outside, so please do keep your hands and feet! Accidents can happen–we had a passenger once who left the train thinking he’d be worshipped as a god by the historicals we were viewing.

I believe they ate him to absorb his “powers.” Anyway, do stay inside the train!

The Natural History really gets underway with Pliny attempting to start at the ground floor in explaining the world. He begins with his conception of the world–”earth” is eternal, (“…eternal, immeasurable, a being that never began to exist and never will perish”, is the translation on p171) and Pliny scoffs at those who have broached the idea of atoms, a little rudely. He also scoffs at those who claim to have deduced the circumference (“dimensions”) of the earth. His assertion that we don’t even understand the “inside” of the Earth and so, cannot possibly hope to understand an outside which he doesn’t think even exists is one of the crankiest (and most hilarious) “YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN” moments I’ve read in a long while.

Nevertheless, he goes on to say, the world is round, it revolves–as the motion of the sun tells us, he states–every 24 hours, at “indescribable” velocity. His digression here, wondering if the sound of that revolution is so constant we don’t hear it anymore, or if it’s silent and if so, what that silence says about the revolution, is particularly fascinating. We may laugh at Pliny for not liking the idea of atoms or a measurable circumference of Earth, but he’s actively trying to understand with the best conceptual tools available to him.

Pliny moves from sky to earth, just like any creation myth he would have been familiar with (even if he doesn’t ascribe to a particular one so far) and he asserts that the earth is revolving in the centre of “space.”

This would seem to be a direct contradiction to his assertion that there’s nothing other than “the earth”: “…huis vi suspensamcum cum quarto aquarum elemento librari medio spatii telurum. (p176, line 11)” for which the translation given is “suspended by its force in the centre of space is poised the earth, and with it the fourth element, that of the waters.” I was initially unsure whether to read this as a kind of doublethink, a lacuna in his conceptualization, or if my reading of the translation and my (highly imperfect) Latin was missing a vital nuance. [1]mundum (the earth) with “…quocumque nomine alio caelum appellare libuit cuius circumplexu teguntur cuncta, which is “whatever other name men have chosen to designate the sky whose vaulted roof encircles the universe” (pp 170-171) So, upon going back to the beginning and thinking a bit, I decided he means his universe is limitless since it includes the sky and whatever the earth and sky are suspended in–or, the sky is space, and the universe is immeasurable, which means he may have been cranky old man but he was also right, and guilty of only a quite natural Ptolemaic geocentrism.

His view of the four elements–earth, air, fire, water–keeping the immensity of the world from collapsing is a pretty elegant one, drawn from what information he and his fellows had or could discern of the world. All the same, even as the earth revolves, he views it as the unmoving centre of a whirl of other forces–the stars and planets in their celestial courses move strangely, and their visible motion (as of a “wheel”) very much made the case for “earth” as the omphalos, revolving in place as everything else whirls around it. All in all, it’s the best effort for understanding the world he could have made, even if it might make for some funny business just around the bend, when he gets to the planets. He quite naturally next turns to “the seven stars which owing to their motion we call ‘planets’[2], although no stars wander less than they do”(p177), among which he counts the sun. It’s fascinating to remember that they had very little in the way of telescopes, so the lights that could be seen by the naked eye but didn’t behave like the rest of the stars–sun, moon, Venus and Mars, comets, etc.–were classified differently, and that the Greek upon which he heavily draws gave birth to the zodiac.

All in all, you can tell he thought long and hard about the right place to begin, and what he could assert. Next week we’ll be moving forward through the wanderers. Feel free to adjourn to the public dining car and discuss!

[1]Side note: I love the word “lacuna”. It is a buttercup yellow and tastes somewhere between strawberries and fresh, salted cream.

[2]For the Greek “wanderers”.

Growing Up

C Is For Cookie

Me: “I made cookie dough. I am an adult. I CAN EAT ALL OF IT IF I WANT.”

The Princess: “You know how sick that makes you, Mum.”

Me: …

The Princess: “THINK ABOUT YOUR CHOICES.”

ME: “Oh, for God’s sake.” *puts dough in fridge*

Children. They mostly teach you, not the other way ’round.

Nazarian’s Consequences

So. Vera Nazarian is running an Indiegogo campaign, ostensibly to pay the authors who have chosen to remain with Norilana Books the royalties they’re due. Sounds like an okay thing to do, right?

No. It’s not. Would you like to know why?

Because Nazarian IS Norilana Books. And she’s the same person who hasn’t paid royalties to her authors for multiple years, borrowed $100K for “business expenses” and then discharged that debt through bankruptcy (her creditor is, sadly, passed on), who asked the SFF community for help with her mortgage etc. and took in a large chunk of money that has since vanished, admits to not having a separate business checking account ever so what royalties do come in go straight to her personal expenses–I could go on, but a few clicks through those links will give you an idea.

Nazarian showed up in the comments to the Passive Voice post. I encourage you to go read through and note what her comments did not include, and what, as far as I can tell, her online begging for money has never included. Here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list:

* An apology for stealing the royalties due to those authors who believed in her enough to entrust her with their work. She could start with reading Scalzi’s post on how to apologize.

* Concrete accounting of where the missing royalties went–if you’re asking for more after over $170K (by one reckoning) has disappeared, posting a detailed breakdown of where all that cash went is a good idea.

* Getting an accountant or escrow officer to oversee the disbursement of these funds she’s asking for to the authors in question. (Note that Nazarian says she doesn’t have the “time or money” for this, though I’m sure someone with accounting experience in the SFF community can be found, OR the Indiegogo campaign can be modified to include such a cost.)

* An explanation of why her Indiegogo campaign to ostensibly benefit the authors whose royalties were stolen is “flexible funding” (as Nazarian’s other Indiegogo campaigns to self-publish her work have been). This is a concern because “flexible” means that even if the full amount isn’t raised, Nazarian gets the cash. You could argue that it’s better for the authors to get some money even if the campaign doesn’t reach its goal, but I invite you to cogitate upon whether they’re going to see any from a person who won’t engage oversight and down whose gullet so much has already disappeared.

* Clear, verifiable transparency in accounting for whatever funds she has taken in through Norilana Books, her various fundraisers, and “loans” from “friends” in the SFF community.

I find it saddening and a little grotesque that Nazarian still has a core of defenders, most of whom seem to think it’s okay for her to continue asking for money because “she’s a good person” or “the Norilana books were so pretty!” or some other reason. Even if Nazarian has merely been tragically misguided or just the victim of awful circumstance, if these people truly want to support and defend her, now is the time to say, “Honey, let’s find an accountant for you and start sorting this mess out. No more excuses. Also, stop spending all your time in comment sections of posts detailing how your behaviour looks more and more like theft the longer one examines it. Just stop.” I really don’t care how “nice” she is personally. My ex-husband was incredibly charming in person, and it helped him “borrow” money he never repaid from all sorts of people. “Nice” does not mean “trustworthy.” Whether Nazarian is untrustworthy because of circumstances or through intent also does not matter much at this point. The bare fact is, money keeps vanishing and she keeps asking for even more.

Also, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference how pretty the books are, or how Norilana “took a chance” on them or “was asked to publish” them. For multiple YEARS now, authors have not been paid for those pretty books. Who has? Nazarian. Who admits she doesn’t have (and implies she has never had) a separate business account for author royalties, just her own personal bank account. (Yes, that’s one thing I just can’t get over in all this, that admission.)

I don’t have a dog in this fight. My only (incredibly tenuous) connection to Norilana Books is that one of my writing partner‘s short stories was in an anthology brought out by Norilana in 2009. I’m bothering to post this because it’s so damn egregious, and because, as Dierdre Moran has pointed out frequently, something needs to be said.

Last thing: Be reasonable in the comments, folks.

photo by:


Tax Credits

Window Day!

This week has turned into a mad scramble, with yesterday being the “dear God can the world just stop whirling?” day. Not only was there forgetting of school items in the morning, but I also had to visit my accountant’s office (seriously, they’re awesome) and take a certain someone for a birthday lunch, but there was also the C2C poetry open mic to help with and window treatments to take down and furniture to move in the basement.

This morning there’s furniture to move in the upstairs, because (can you feel the excitement? I CAN!) IT’S NEW WINDOW TIME. The Chez has the original aluminum windowframes–remember when the polar vortex visited here and I was moaning about how there was ICE INSIDE MY HOUSE? (Maybe you don’t. Rest assured the moaning was almost constant.) I decided I’d look into financing for windows because OMG, forty-year-old ones just are NOT cutting it.

So, clearing stuff away from the windows and taking down curtain rods and stuff is the order of the day.

Yesterday evening I was so tired I couldn’t even do basic math at the open mic. (Sorry, nice lady with credit slip. I’m not stupid, I swear, it’s just that the maths, they are complex for my braaaaane, which is wired for Other Things.) It took me concentrated effort to run the register, which hasn’t happened in a dog’s age.

Speaking of dogs, they know something’s happening. Keeping them corralled with a bunch of window guys in the house is going to be fun.

Further bulletins as events warrant…

photo by:


Exothermic

Hiss and Retreat

It’s one of those days where I need a List, otherwise nothing will get done, because I will simply wander the house not knowing where to start and end up eating Oreos by the handful.

Well, that’s not strictly true. I have no Oreos in the house.

Today is for accounting (ugh), piano practice (yay?), getting to a specific point in Agent Zero (Sekrit agent meets waitress, hijinks ensue), transcribing what I have of Rattlesnake Wind from spiral-bound notebook to Word (which I still use, I just can’t get used to Scrivener), and a few other things to prep for some intense work on the house this weekend. (Big excitement here at Chez Saintcrow.) Also, I need to catch up on Citizen Radio.

Last but not least, if you’ve been looking for a way to make a little change in the world, why not hop on over to Kiva? For every person I invite who makes a loan, I get a $25 credit to donate somewhere. This makes me happy.

I currently have a zero percent default rate on 67 loans, which is pretty spiffy. Granted, I only loan to women and groups of women, and I look for a full due diligence rating[1]. It may be wrong to attribute the zero percent default to those things, but oh well, that’s what I attribute it to. I also tend to confine my loans to the Vulnerable Groups section, just on principle. Of course, YMMV and you can loan to whoever the fuck you want. I’m just saying, if you’ve been wanting to do something like that, feel free to use that link.

Anyway, I’m off to the races. It’s supposed to be 60+F and sunny today. The big yellow thing in the sky hates me, so I’m going to hiss and retreat under my rock to get some work done.

Over and out.

[1] For a long explanation of why I do so, you can check out Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood.

Pliny’s Table of Contents

Heading through the suburbs

Admittedly, I just skimmed most of Book I, which is Pliny’s dedication and the table of contents, each with a list of sources afterward.

What strikes me going through here (albeit at a fast clip) is the burning urge to organise what knowledge he had. The fact that portents and signs and hyperbole were so common in the scientific literature of classical antiquity shouldn’t detract from the fact that these were smart people trying to understand their world. I’ve read a lot of history books that come across as nastily paternalistic, laughing up their sleeve at how silly and stupid people “used to be.” I always want to point out two things:

1. People are still stupid, for God’s sake, just look at Fox News.

2. People in ancient Rome, or in medieval times, had theories that stuck around because they seemed to work. Frex: bleeding, purging, bad humors were all attempts to figure out what made someone sick and how to fix it. Surviving such things made you tougher, no doubt, but medical professionals kept doing these things because they seemed to do better than just throwing up their hands and saying “Sorry, you’re gonna die or pull through, we don’t know. Nothing we can do.” It may have been true, but by and large people didn’t accept it, they kept chugging along trying to figure things out, even when doing so carried a high social cost.

In other words: no matter how idiotic we can be, we still do really well at trying to figure out the world around us and explaining it to each other.

Yes, Pliny’s list of sources was really just the Roman equivalent of “old, privileged white men.” Yes, Roman culture was pretty misogynist and xenophobic–as is our own. As the Pliny Train gathers speed and moves ahead–we’re just going through suburbia now, please keep your hands and feet inside–we’re going to keep this in mind, and also keep in mind that two thousand years of (sometimes slow) technological and cultural steps forward really haven’t changed basic human nature or the drive to gain and organise knowledge.

Pliny was working in an age without internet, without combustion engines, without a great deal of complex machinery first-worlders nowadays largely take for granted. A world in which cloth and other things were handmade, a massive investment of time and labor. (I could go into Roman agriculture, but this is just a blog post and you don’t need to hear me geek TOO badly.) Slavery was incredibly widespread, in one form or another. (As it is today.) To survive was an achievement, to have the luxury of literacy, spare time, and education meant you were lucky as shit but it could still all vanish tomorrow, as Marcus Aurelius kept pointing out. If war or disease didn’t get you, a sudden change in the political situation could.

So, let’s read Pliny while trying to understand the world he lived in. It’s still our world–the culture and society I live in right now has significant roots in Rome, as does the very language I’m using to share this train ride with you. People are still born, they still die, they still have eyes and hands and brains and get older and think the damn kids are ruining everything and worry about food and health and home and their families. We’ll come across some things that seem patently idiotic that Pliny took as accepted or verified truth. When we do, let’s remember that two thousand years from now, someone else might be doing the same to us.

Thank you! Enjoy the scenery while we gather speed and head into Book II, the world and its nature.

WAYFARER Release Day!

Well, the day has finally arrived! My retelling of a very particular fairytale is now released into the wild.

The Charmer’s Ball. Midnight. And one glass slipper…

Newly orphaned, increasingly isolated from her friends, and terrified of her violent stepmother, Ellen Sinder still believes she’ll be okay. She has a plan for surviving and getting through high school, which includes keeping her head down and saving any credits she can earn or steal. But when a train arrives from over the Waste beyond New Haven, carrying a golden boy and a new stepsister, all of Ellie’s plans begin to unravel, one by one.

Just when all hope is lost, Ellie meets an odd old woman with a warm hearth and a heavenly garden. Auntie’s kindness is intoxicating, and Ellie finally has a home again. Yet when the clock strikes twelve on the night of the annual Charmer’s Ball, Ellie realizes that no charm is strong enough to make her past disappear…

In a city where Twisted minotaurs and shifty fey live alongside diplomats, hustlers, and charmers, a teenage girl can disappear through the cracks into safety—or into something much more dangerous. So what happens when the only safety you can find wants to consume you as well?

Now available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and independent bookstores.

***

Writing Ellie’s story was difficult, mostly because I was finishing the house-buying process, which was ALL SORTS OF STRESSFUL. It’s the one time in my career I’ve asked for extra time to finish books, though I did end up getting them turned in on time. (I still felt incredibly guilty for even asking.) WAYFARER had a rocky road afterwards too, for reasons related to me leaving YA (temporarily or permanently hasn’t been decided yet) after Ruby’s book–which is still on track to come out next year. (Hopefully. A lot hinges on the numbers for WAYFARER.)

It was also difficult to write because, like , it involved a lot of digging and remembering. Trauma is a funny thing–there are whole chunks of my early life I only remember hazily, and some huge blanks where I’ve blocked some things out to save my own sanity. But for Ellie, I had to remember a time when I was vulnerable and learning that not everyone who offers to help a teenage girl necessarily has said girl’s best interests at heart.

Even if they love her–or think they do.

WAYFARER started when I looked at Ellie and thought two things: boy, she tries so hard to cope, I know what that’s like, and, more interestingly, What if the fairy godmother was just as dangerous as the evil stepmother?

I think about that a lot, and part of the exploration of fairytales is seeing the doubling and mirror-images that go on. The structure of all three books–the publisher calls them Tales of Beauty & Madness, but to me they’ll always be part of my Human Tales cycle–is full of doubles, mirror images, reverses, and twins. Some of them I didn’t even catch while I was writing them.

Anyway, here’s a new story I made for you, dear Readers. Come in, sit down, and let me tell you about a girl whose father died, whose stepmother forced her to work, and how dangerous anything you think a refuge might be…