Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 19

Thursday Quick Notes

Let's see: I have finally have Move Under Ground on non-amazon electronic retailers, thanks to Siliva Moreno-Garcia. One hopes that'll keep the piracy to a minimum. Anyway: NOOK, Kobo, Smashwords.

A classmate launched a weekly meet-up in Dolores Park for push-hands. All welcome, and encouraged, to attend.

The New Oxi Day

Like most toddlers, Oliver learned the word "No" right away. He uses it a lot. It's especially funny when he uses it to get his mother to play a different song while driving in the car. If he doesn't like what he hears he says, "No. No. Nooo. Nooo," until Olivia switches.

So too with Greece. It may seem like Syriza was just floundering, unwilling to either pull out of the euro or end austerity, but they've always been trying to thread a needle, as revealed in this 2012 Vaourfakis blogpost, from long before he was in office or even a prominent political figure: Greek default does NOT equal Greek exit. The argument is simple:

1. there is no mechanism for a euro country to legally exit the euro
2. a new or parallel currency would collapse as the Greek elite has its wealth in euros, and much of it offshore
3. austerity and bail-outs don't work either.

So, austerity or exit is a bad, or even impossible set of bad choices. Everything Syriza has done has been designed to illustrate this, including making marginal changes to their own offers, even simple rhetorical ones where they are willing to submit to some continued cuts in return for debt restructuring at some later date, which is what is giving Germany fits. As some remarkably bright person on Tumblr, for Christ's sake, said, "My point is this: it’s not actually the ratio of how much debt you have to how much capital you have on hand that determines your status, though you might think it definitely should be. What determines insolvency is only whether or not you admit this out loud. That’s what determines whether you can file for bankruptcy, or whether you’re insolvent. The declaration, not your balance books."

Having said all that, I suppose a grexit is still in the cards, but the wound that would open would just let all the peripheral countries out the door, and as the point of the euro is to let the center control the money supply in order to extract from the periphery, well then there's no real reason for a euro without an outer ring of countries with weak economies, is there?

Given the situation, the only immediate alternative is simply to say, "No. No. Noooo. Nooooo."

My Hugo Ballot

My ballot:

Novel:
The Three Body Problem
Ancillary Sword
NO AWARD

Novella:
One Bright Star to Guide Them
NO AWARD

Novelette:
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium
The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale
NO AWARD

Short Story:
NO AWARD

Related Work:
NO AWARD

GRAPHIC STORY:
Saga v 3
NO AWARD

Dramatic Long
EDGE OF TOMORROW
NO AWARD

Dramatic Short
(left blank)

Editor Short
Jennifer Brozek
NO AWARD

Editor Long
NO AWARD

Pro Artist
NO AWARD

Semi-Pro
Lightspeed
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Apex & Abyss
Strange Horizons
Andromeda Spaceways

Fanzine
NO AWARD
(I would have put Black Gate up above NA but am honoring their withdrawal)

FANCAST
NO AWARD (and I shall always vote NO AWARD for this category!)

FAN WRITER
NO AWARD

FAN ARTIST
(left blank)

CAMPBELL
Wesley Chu
NO AWARD

All this stuff and more...

Hey, I'm back. July is bachelor month for me, and finish-this-book month, so it may even be possible. Some quick thoughts:

1. gay marriage is now legal in the US. A good reform, though marriage is itself on the way out. I suspect not very many same-sex couples will marry after all.

2. the other day, the BN.com Sci-Fi Blog gave Move Under Ground some nice ink, which led to me discovering that not one but two pirate NOOK editions of the book were available for purchase, both of which were ripped from my old Creative Commons site. I DMCAed them down, and then my friend and publisher Silvia set up a Smashwords edition for me, which I hope will be up on all the non-amazon sites soon.

2.5 Speaking of Silvia, she is running a 30% off sale on all Innsmouth Free Press books, including The Nickronomicon.

3. I've been seeing many people pass around the Indiegogo campaign to save Greece, which is run by Some Guy Who Is Sure He Can Get The Money to Greece Somehow. Amazingly, he's actually raised some money. You people are morons. By the way, the Bank of Greece has been accepting solidarity donations for some time if you really wish to crowdfund the continuation of the EZ. Anyway, Greece should default, start up the drachma, nationalize the banks and big shipping, and orient trade toward the East and Iberia (which will soon follow in defaulting anyway).

More later!

Buy a Tor Book Day

Because of Puppy-related boycotts against Tor Books for Irene Gallo supposedly insufficiently apologizing for her political description of Puppy movements, there has been launched a countermovement to buy Tor titles today, on June 19th. Might I suggest...

Haunted Legends. It's my anthology co-edited with Ellen Datlow that did all sorts of anti-puppy things like

*telling stories from all around the world
*publishing avant-garde writers and traditional genre writers together, between the same covers
*selecting works based on quality rather than on who our friends and colleagues are thanks to actually reading and accepting open submissions

It also won the Bram Stoker Award, and was nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. "The Folding Man" by Joe Lansdale won the Stoker for best short story, and "Return to Mariabronn" by Gary Braunbeck was nominated. “The Foxes” by Lily Hoang was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award as well.

It's available in hardcover, softcover, or electron form as well. So knock yourself out!

One more post about mentally ill terrorists

With the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white guy with a bowl haircut shot and killed several black parishioners, we again come to the big conversation: was he a terrorist, or was he mentally ill. The answer is clear—most likely both.

His attack was from what we know, explicitly political, given his alleged comment "you rape our women and you’re taking over our country". That makes him different from, say, the Aurora Colorado shooter, whose attack on a movie theater had no political content.

Our shooter also had an assortment of far-right views, including being in favor of segregation according to his roommate, wore fairly obscure racist symbols (a patch of the flag of Rhodesia? That's digging deep!), and a Confederate Flag license plate.

He is clearly a political actor, and that makes his actions terrorism. He hardly needs to be a member of a group, as the white supremacist movement has been well-acquainted with leaderless resistance for years.

However, this doesn't mean that the shooter isn't mentally ill or at least unbalanced. Terror groups seek out the unbalanced for several reasons:

1. it works—people who are isolated or under significant stress are more amenable to propaganda appeals. People with friends will be talked out of extreme behaviors by those friends. People not under more than ordinary stress have better things to do with their time, or aren't tempted by paltry monetary awards or promises of extravagant heavenly ones. (What are the chances this shooter had a girlfriend? I'm thinking zero. What are the chances he had some "nice guy" narrative, except instead of "asshole jocks" he had "black guys" as his imaginary rivals for women? Pretty fucking high.)

2. they're useful—in the ordinary run of politics, even fringe politics, the too unstable are not useful. You're not going to buy a copy of a socialist newspaper or take a Tea Party leaflet from some weirdo who glares from afar but who won't make eye contact close-up. Twitching ramblers don't make for good public speakers, nor do people with flat affect. Ordinary people have a sense for sociopaths and work to avoid them. But, if you're looking for casual violence, there are plenty of unstable people who'll get a gun or motor vehicle or some dynamite and will make it happen.

3. they're easy to disavow—it was drugs! He was crazy! He just found our material at random on the Internet! He came to a meeting and told him to go away! (Most often, people like this are told they're not serious and they need to prove themselves...)

If you live on the political fringes, you'll find a lot of weirdos. Yeah yeah, look in the mirror, I know. Anyway, it's true. Obsessives, lost souls, misfits. Not every marginal personality is mentally ill, of course, but enough are. And there are plenty of mentally ill people who are fine comrades, good political leaders, and almost entirely immune to the appeal of individual violence.

But there are enough truly unbalanced people out there who become actual political terrorists because actual political terror groups aim their propaganda at the marginal and the disposable.

Short Stories and Money in a Golden Moment

I am not a fan of the advice that beginning writers should write short fiction before they tackle a novel. The plain fact is that many aspiring writers don't read short fiction, don't like short fiction, and don't have any ideas for short stories, so it's a waste of their time to try to develop the habit, cultivate the taste, and come up with ideas they're not organically interested in.

But, just the other night, I received via Paypal a surprise check for some short stories—audio rights to the anthologies they were in had sold. It's not a huge check, but it definitely represented a day's takehome pay for an average US household. Luckily for me, we happen to be living in a golden moment of anthologies, both for original fiction and phonebook-sized volumes of reprinted fiction. I rarely write anything except for solicitations these days, and rarely submit to magazines, as I'm too busy with anthology stories. Digital audio platforms also seem quite eager to record fiction anthologies, so second and third paydays are not uncommon. And it got me to thinking...

In 2008, I moved back to California. At around the same time, I received a solicitation from Ellen Datlow to write a Lovecraft-themed short story, and an invitation from the "SF in SF" reading series to participate upon my return. I wrote my Carver/Lovecraft mash-up "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" overnight, and brought the first draft to the reading to try out.

To the reading my friends Kurt and Jody brought along a friend of theirs from their book club—Reader, I married her. Now I have an adorable nineteen-month-old son as well.

Right after the reading, the story sold to Datlow's anthology Lovecraft Unbound, which was to be published by M Press, the fiction imprint of Dark Horse. I think I got around $150 (It's a very short story—2350 words.) M Press folded, but the book did come out via Dark Horse and, surprise, was a hit! Lovecraft does well in comic shops as it turns out. The anthology earned out and I got a couple of royalty checks: one for $20, and one for around $5.

I also came to the attention of the anthology's Dark Horse editor, Rachel Edidin, who loved the story, the title, and who wanted to eat my brain she said. And, as LU was a hit despite the end of M Press, she was allowed to acquire more books. And that's how Brian Keene and I sold The Damned Highway—our Lovecraft/Hunter S. Thompson mash-up to Dark Horse. And that's how my next novel, Love is the Law also came to be published by Dark Horse. (Think around $12,000.) Then a third LU check for $13.13, which I remember exactly because of the fun number.

Then Ellen launched her all-reprint anthology Lovecraft's Monsters and reprinted my story, which paid out around $50. Lovecraft's Monsters has done very well, and was part of a Humble Bundle: so I got a royalty check for around $66 out of nowhere because the book moved something over 10,000 electronic copies that way. It sold to Russia and Brazil—another $30 or so for translation rights. And then the most recent check for around $150, which was mostly for this story and partially for audio rights to another Datlow/Dark Horse antho, "Work, Shoot, Hook, Rip" from Nightmare Carnival.

So, an evening's enjoyable giggle-while-I-type work, over the years, paid out directly to the tune of over $400, and paid out indirectly with two novel sales and a friggin' family. And "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" also led to another round of other short fiction solicitations—the results of which can be read in The Nickronomicon, which also paid an advance and royalties and got a foreign sale.

This is a fairly unusual short fiction story—most stories come and then just go, especially when anthologized as opposed to published online or given an award. But it's not unheard of. My story "Thy Shiny Car in the Night" from Long Island Noir ($200) was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories ($700) and led directly to a year's work as a lecturer at Wilkes University's MFA program (~$10,000) and a few crime fiction solicitations. "Arbeitskraft", a novelette, was published in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (~$425) and then in quick succession in Steampunk III: Revolutions ($100) Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy ($85), in audio for Steampunk Specs ($100) and The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction ($100), and in the Czech language in Plnou parou ($50). A number of my other stories have also been multiply reprinted or have led to other work.

Incidentally, if you wonder why I am not in favor of just giving work away to literary journals, or worse, paying to submit, I hope my reasoning is clearer now.

I still don't recommend that writers write short stories if they do not like to read them, but I would also recommend avoiding falling into the trap of pointing to the low pay rates of short fiction ("Five cents a word, duh! Hasn't changed since 1955!") and deciding that the endeavor is entirely useless. It's not.

Two Day Job Titles

Over at the ol' day job, we have two books coming out today I think you might like.

The first is Gene Mapper, the new hardish SF title from Haikasoru, by Taiyo Fujii. Publishers Weekly called it a new kind of cyberpunk novel that’s well grounded in the physical world and modern computing. Sound good? It does!

I also edited my first-ever manga. It was originally assigned to someone else, but that editor was so grossed out by the art that it was transferred over to me. Naturally, I'm talking Junji Ito and his short story collection Fragments of Horror, which is a nice little hardback edition.

I'm a Bad Boy

Hugo nominee Jeffro Johnson is extremely upset with me, as he believes I have delivered unto him "the biggest insult I have ever received in my life..."

What I said was: “Do not refer to yourself as a person to whom honor is important again.”


My response on his site is in moderation. I'll bring this post public if it does not go through.

He won't let it through. So here is the comment I wished to leave on his post:



The transactional psychology game you are playing here is called Kick Me.

This game began by you suggesting a neutral space after everyone heads on over to the website of a guy who thinks blacks are a subspecies of humanity, Jews run the banks, and that a Nazi political party in Greece is the lesser of two evils to read your work.

When people objected to this, I pointed out that though you made a mistake in signing up with Beale, plenty of other people well-integrated into the field made a very similar mistake by cooperating with the Church of Scientology. This, you see, was an obvious defense of your decision, and anyone outside of the hothouse of this website would see it as just that. It was a suggestion that other commenters not get too worked up about your work appearing CH, especially if they spent the last X years lauding and palling around with self-selected goodwill ambassadors for Co$.

You’ll also note that I had no problem visiting the CH blog, and addressed you on the topic of your Lovecraft post.

You decided that this was one of several attacks against you. I pointed out that if you thought this was an attack, you should get out more. This is true. If you read a defense and decide that it is an attack, you have miscalibrated something essential.

You see, I started from the presumption—because I am a person of honor—that you were saying what you believed to be true. Not that you were lying, or purposefully ginning up a controversy for either clicks or cyberhugs from your regular readers, or that you were literally incapable of telling truth from falsehood due to some psychological issue.

After you played your little self-described “prank”, it became clear to me that you were likely somewhat immature, which is likely why you consider basic critiques of your work to be withering and harsh. However, you didn’t necessarily have to be immature. In my time, I’ve noticed that there are two types of people who have a lot of trouble with even minor criticisms—young, immature guys, and middle-aged men who haven’t quite realized that the Internet is not their personal dining room table and that readers don’t have to just nod and say “Yes, Dad.”

So I asked how old you were, and, because I am a man of honor, made it clear that I was not going to “prank” you back.

You decided, after misrepresenting me, calling me out, faking friendly interest, and playing a (gormless) prank, that you had had enough? No son, that’s not behaving honorably.

Behaving honorably means doing things you may not feel like doing—fairness in interactions is one of the essential elements of honor. (You can trust an honorable person on a handshake; for everyone else, there are contracts.) You treated me unfairly, and when I gave you the chance to treat me fairly—answering a simple question, you decided to pout like a child instead even as you claimed that honor was important to you.

Well, if honor is less important to you than your momentary feelings, honor is not important to you. Don’t worry—it’s not important to most people.

You talk about noblesse oblige. Being a writer doesn’t make me a noble, and it is worth pointing out that nobles used their occasional exercises in goodwill and mercy primarily to justify their continued reign and exploitation of the lower orders. But if you’re curious about noblesse oblige, note that I didn’t write a big blog post on my site about what an immature fellow you are. It would have been easy, and I was tempted, but it wouldn’t have been fair and so I didn’t do it. And it still wouldn’t be fair.

So here’s what I recommend: do not type the letters M-A-M-A-T-A-S in that order onto this blog or any other blog you might have again. If you don’t want to hear from me, that’s the best way. If you would like to continue your game of “Kick Me”, well, keep at it.

Be About It!

I'm reading tonight:

Be About It
Fri., June 12, 7 p.m.
Free
Release party for the zine Be About It with readings by Gina Gold, Keeley Ann Finn, Jesse Prado, Cassandra Dallett, Vernon Keeve III, Nick Mamatas, John Mortara, Sarah Kobrinsky, Kimberly Kim, and more.

Ale Industries
3060 East 10th Street
Oakland CA