Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 218

Penguicon

Tomorrow I'm off to Penguicon, where I shall be running ragged but having a good old time in the process. Check out this schedule, which I post here for my own reference as much as anyone else's:

5/2/2009, 9:00, Boardroom: Writers Workshop (Preregistration Required)
5/2/2009, 11:00, Ballroom 2: Can I Be Your Friend? Bringing Authors and Readers Together
5/2/2009, 14:00, Poolside 1: So You Want to Quit Your Day Job?
5/2/2009, 16:00, Poolside 1: What's So Funny?

5/3/2009, 8:00, Poolside 1: National No

How Many Books do you Have to Sell?

Publishers and authors tend to keep actual numbers under wraps when it comes to print runs and books sold. As a result, new authors are often clueless as to what's normal. I know I was completely lost the first time I saw actual numbers for Goblin Quest. Was my book selling well? Was I going to get dumped if I didn't sell 100,000 books in the first year? How many books did my publisher actually print?

I don't actually know what my print runs have been. I have some guesses, but nothing from

"Warriors" and Story Seedlings

Has anyone else caught the show Warriors on the History Channel?

The premise is pretty simple. Green Beret and veteran Terry Schappert "travels the globe to discover exactly what it takes to be a warrior." Each week they study a particular warrior culture: Vikings, Samurai, Zulu, examining everything from the weapons to the tactics to the role of the warrior in this particular culture. There's usually a story structure, following a particular military leader and/or battle.

From an academic stan

Everybody was Kung Fu Writing

[image error] Posted over at SF Novelists today. Click the image to go read. If nothing else, I amused myself, so that's got to count for something, right?

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and ideas for my presentation. Very much appreciated.

Not much to say today. The rewrite and I continue to do battle. Currently the rewrite is winning, but that always happens at the 30K word range. I still need to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for the thing on Monday, too. But not tomorrow, as I'll be ge

Brain Picking: Hot New Trends and Writers

This coming Monday, I'm doing a presentation for a group of Michigan Librarians entitled "Beyond Sparkly Vampires: Hot New Writers and Trends in Science Fiction and Fantasy". I have a little over an hour to try to introduce these people to the popular subgenres and up-and-coming writers.

I've got a rough outline put together with some names and titles already. However, the LJ brain collective is vast, with far more knowledge and memory than any single drone, so I figured I'd open this up and as

Significant Others (Rape Awareness Month)

Like my previous rape awareness posts, this one has the potential to be triggering.

The rape counseling program at Listening Ear didn't just offer counseling and services to survivors of rape. We offered those same services to significant others, by which we meant anyone close enough to the survivor to be affected and need our support: boyfriends/girlfriends, spouses, family members, close friends, etc.

I've been the significant other far too often. For myself, there's a lot of anger and pain, a

Once a Princess, by Sherwood Smith

Okay, first thing's first. If you're going to read Once a Princess [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], you'll probably want to pick up Twice a Prince [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] as well, since the end of book one leaves a fair amount unresolved.

There's a lot to like about Once a Princess. From the product description, "Warning: This title contains a kick-butt mother-daughter team, a wicked king, a witty pirate with an unfortunate taste for neon colors, inept resistance fighters, a dreamy prince who

Agentlove, Writerfail, and Other Made-up Words

beth_bernobich wrote an agentlove post in response to another Agents are Evil! essay. Coincidentally, that same day I found myself in an Amazon chat on self-publishing wherein I was told that self-publishing is the future, publishers won't buy new work, and the industry hasn't changed much in 150 years so if it was good enough for Charles Dickens*, it's good enough for us!

This has been a long month, and I find myself less patient than usual when people splash stupid all over my screen. Publish

Happy Birthday to Me!

Not only is April 15 tax day here in the States, it's also the day the Titanic went down, the day Lincoln died ... and my birthday, marking the start of Year 35 in this here realm.

So what did I get for my birthday this year? I'm glad you asked! First off, and most importantly, I got handmade birthday cards from the kids. My son's card has a story (transcribed by his sister) about Daddy and his friends the Transformers, Superheroes, and Planet Heroes. My daughter's card had a portrait of me.

Update

By a single vote, sylvia_rachel won the haiku contest for her poem "Princess with a Sword". Congrats! Sylvia, please e-mail me at jchines42 -at- hotmail.com so we can get your copy of The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] sent your way. (I wonder if my Amazon Associate credit will work at Amazon.ca. Guess we'll find out!)

Thanks for all of the good thoughts for my son (and for the Locus thing.) Son is still in the hospital, but improving. Daughter also came down with this, but