Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 34

And Now the Winner for Most Awful Social Media Gambit...

With Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr being so popular, you may have forgotten that the humble email newsletter can be a great way to annoy and outrage the people you so callously see as empty consumption machines for your shit. For example, here's an email recently sent out by Stuckist artist Terry Marks. Note that the bolded text is in the original:

From: "terry marks" <info@terrymarks.net>
Date: Jun 20, 2014 1:16 PM
Subject: FYI future art invites
To:
Cc:

I am using a new email service for my art exhibition news & invites. I recently sent one to you that was marked as un-viewed, and am writing to see if you received it, or if there was some problem on the sending end. If you have a spare minute, could you please check for me? I would really appreciate knowing what is up.

If you use gmail, it might have gone into your promotions tab, a new feature google is using to sort your mail. If that's the case, drag the email into your primary tab, and say yes when google asks if you want to do this for future mailings.

If it went in your spam folder by mistake, you can tell your email program to mark it as not spam.

Also, in order for you to see everything in the message, you have to click on view images, which is where I put photos, or gallery cards & press releases. If you don't do this part, I won't know you've seen it.

Any questions about any of this, please drop me a line.
And of course, if you don't want to receive invites & news from me, you can unsubscribe as well.

here's the email to look for:
date: June 19th, 2014
title: art exhibition opens June 19th
from Terry Marks <info@terrymarks.net> via madmimi.com

I hope you can get to see Art from the Boros II; if you missed the opening reception it's up through August.

thank you so very much!
--Terry
http://www.terrymarks.net
twitter: terrymarksNYart


Rudeness, now fully automated.

Some writing junk

So over the course of the past five weeks, I wrote five short stories. (One was actually a "mistake"—too long for the venue I was aiming for but also done a month early as I'd misremembered the deadline, so I have to submit it like a chump to magazines and such.) Three have been accepted so far, which is nice. Two are to appear in anthologies with the words "street" and "shadow" in their titles, just to show how creative everyone is. Also, I was happy to hear that the Kindle-only anthology Whispers From the Abyss will be going in to print. I got a renewal contract in the morning, and my fee in the evening. So it's all going well. There was even a weird anomaly this week with one of my novels—somewhere in the South Central United States, an imaginary region whose borders are known only to Bookscan, some class or book club or crazy person bought sixteen copies of my 2011 novel Sensation. Three years later, it usually sells 1-3 Bookscan recordable copies a week, so that was weird.

At the day job, we have a product page for my latest anthology, Phantasm Japan. Coming in September. Why not pre-order if it sounds interesting?

I'm also most of the way through the latest Writing Salon workshop, and this has been a tiring one. Perhaps it's because nobody has dropped out, and it's a big class full of productive people. Usually, if I start with, say, nine people, three or four drop out by the fourth week. Or perhaps it's because some of the writers are very needy and very bad. Most people don't take my invitation to email me at any time as an invitation to email *every* time they come up with something—and whose every email involves a plea for some form of positive feedback. And of course, there's conflict. As if I'm telling them lies about writing and publishing, and they think they can catch me in a contradiction or falsehood if they keep the conversation going.

I'm increasingly convinced that while taste is subjective, quality is—if not outright objective—intersubjective. One hint that this is the case is that writing is developmental. Not only do beginners make a lot of mistakes, they make a lot of the same mistakes. One can even predict, to a certain extent, what a beginning writer will write and what infelicities they'll depend on and structural howlers they'll commit based on demographics.

Young men will use scene breaks as though they were commercial breaks. Older men who read widely will use an enormous number of complex-compound sentences and tons of awkward constructions (e.g., it's not a boat it's a "floating wind-powered conveyance with auxiliary internal combustion propulsion" because it is apparently vulgar to say the word "boat" twice in the same paragraph). Middle-aged women will have their characters repeat themselves a dozen times in a row because arguments never finish and never change. Younger women often have their characters alone, brooding endlessly. Only people who read a lot of adventure fiction will ever initially have their characters experience anything in scene—everyone else details every incident of their protagonists' lives in flashback, brutally and without appeals to either mercy or common sense. But of course those adventure-lovers cannot write a decent sentence.

About three-quarters of my classes involve structural issues, which are intimately related to POV, which in turn defines character and information flow. There's a logic to point-of-view that people, raised on either television or Romantic notions of what an artist is, simply don't understand at first. They can read dozens of books without ever even thinking about their structures. TV ruins any idea of giving information to a reader in any logical or consistent way, and Romantic views means that whatever pops into one's head needs to get on that page and stay there, no matter what. (This is complicated by the rise of self-published work which makes many of the same errors, but that become successful via price competition anyway. So if I'm so smart, how come I ain't rich?)

Getting it is a slow process that requires a lot of drilling, and a lot of reading with an eye toward something other than filling one's brain-hole. Only recently have I realized how much taiji had influenced my teaching style. Drilling and corrections, drilling and corrections, principles and demonstrations-via-sparring. And, of course, in good taiji classes, practices are demystified rather than continually mystified. Any teacher that performs a trick on you without showing you the material basis of the trick is a cult-leader or simply uninterested in teaching. Other teachers are often surprised that I don't assign the reading of good stories, but I consider that just out-of-class practice—in the same way people are expected to practice their taiji forms at home and find a push-hands group outside of class as well to try out what they're learning. If one already isn't reading a novel and a handful of stories every week, it hardly matters what happens in class.

And like taiji, writing's quality can actually be measured. There is a such a thing as good and bad, effective and ineffective. Thus the importance of tuishou and sanshou sparring in taiji, and actually attempting to publish and be read in writing.

Bloomsday

Ulysses, an audio book free at archive.org.

Quick Note on Iraq

When a relatively small militia column sweeps through a bunch of cities, and when 30,000 troops dissolve rather than fight 1000 people with light arms, you're not dealing with an outside militia trying to take over, you're dealing with a group that has the backing—some of it enthusiastic, some of it tacit—of much of the population.

This is the End...?

So today is Wednesday and on Wednesday the Bookscan numbers come out. And this week, for the first week since its release eight months ago, zero copies of Love is the Law have sold, according to Bookscan. That doesn't mean that zero copies have actually sold. The Kindle rank suggests that one-three ebook copies sold last week via amazon. Bookstores not reporting to Bookscan, like local heroes could have sold paper copies, as could any number of other independent stores and comic book shops, the latter of which especially tend to not report and often carry Dark Horse prose titles.

Of course, I've been busy. I've also decisively stopped linking to amazon, and readers don't respond to publisher links or powells.com links nearly as enthusiastically as they do amazon links. And I've had other books to talk about—The Last Weekend (an import basically only available on amazon and via mail order from Borderlands Books, and the All You Need Is KILL graphic novel. So, is this the end of Love is the Law? Eh, probably, unless something happens—an award nomination, an excellent late review, a murder inspired by the book. The consistent if tiny word of mouth Love is the Law gets likely continues to help in ways too small to measure on a weekly basis.

Barnes & Noble still has copies, which is "nice" to see. Nice in that returns usually begin after just three to six months, so there may have been sales and re-orders, or at least some mercy in culling the shelves. The book is the sort of thing a browser might just pick up and take home because it is inexpensive and looks distinctive. But "nice" to see is relative. Here's how it works:

I see my book in the store and think, Oh no, nobody is buying my book!

I don't see my book in the store and think, Oh no, the bookstore isn't even ordering my book!

So you can't win, though obviously high Bookscan #s are better than low ones. My usual link, to Dark Horse's own site, which ships from local Portland store Things From Another World, also doesn't report to Bookscan, so I'm not helping reportage either. I just find amazon viscerally loathsome these days.

What to do? There isn't much to do. This post can be seen as a kind of vulgar reverse psychology—now someone'll buy a copy of the book after reading that the book isn't selling, yeah! Ultimately the answer is just to move on to the next thing, which is getting a US deal for The Last Weekend and seeing how that goes. And maybe there will be no more novels after that at all, which is fine, as I prefer writing short stories. Even in these dying moments of the late anthology boom, there's still plenty of opportunity out there for someone who likes short fiction and who fits the "weirdo" slot lots of anthologists have.

And then...well. This just happened. Literally, I got this in my email, as a comment under a Google+ link to an early review of Love is the Law, right now:



Here's a Google translate:

Give me one good reason why I should even give a single dollar when you deal with is learning disabled and as a pariah? When you beg people to buy your shit - I'll buy some readers my projects along with the DVD of the film that I look at my roster and will connect with things you find on bandcamp.com. Tell me Nick; Why should I buy your shit when all you do is smother me? Now they are on an equal footing as you - and he said something pretty strong to my fellow TOC, because some of the readers who really do not deserve. I'm too good for them are my personal friends, you've taken a big bowel movement on those who have gone their own for years. Your friends turn around and do the same thing that they were vehemently against in 2004.
         Maybe sit down and give my work a real possibility then think about what I said - I do not say this as I am in English and using bing to help me say this, so my family can see this in Ofena. Think about that before you as someone who has learned everything yourself as you look like a child molester of your photographs choke. I am the attorney for the under-published; self-published and web-published - had not changed anything on that aspect. One thing he did - sold my work and had been in magazines for horror, science fiction and creative nonfiction. Sometimes the magazine pays very little but you pay the same - but think about that one. Look what happened to Jani Lane in 2011; When they found him dead in a hotel room by his own vomit, without a single dollar to his name. Let me ask you this - what do you think the money to go towards my novel when I make a sale?
        I will tell you - and donate to the ministries to feed the children. Donated to St. Jude on behalf of a friend who moved to Los Angeles and gave him the anthology that I have done which has become the most personal project I've done and had this project in my old high school. This project is going to my cup of tea for many generations - and my mission with my company expanded further the mission of August Derleth; to obtain H.P. Lovecraft in public high schools. I only project that is too much. Do you really want to choke something like that? I had to re-think what he did Jani Lane and one of my authors is really thinking of doing his biography, he asked me to co-write this but with the dark mind I have. I do not want to do something that has tainted his memory. - I've contributed enough to make him a scapegoat; but think about this - God had used a little project I have been thinking a lot about when I first published in 2007. When I rebooted it. It is my most personal anthology - so you really want to choke something like that?

This is the first I've heard from Pacione in years. O, Imp of the Perverse who rules the universe, you give me such odd things.

Tuesday Quick Notes

Edge of Tomorrow made $29.1m domestically over the weekend, which is better than its early tracking of $25m, but since it didn't entirely blow away tracking (say, with $35m), the media is still burying it. We'll see how much it drops for week 2—we want to keep it in the twenty millions. The Fault in Our Stars had a huge Saturday drop, but still made $40m. People are watching to see if all the excited fans who saw it on Friday night will see it again this Friday night. And next Friday night. And every Friday night of the summer. Which is certainly a possibility. yendi pointed out that Edge is inspiring think pieces in a real-life newspaper, so that is nice.

In other day job news, the Japan Times, also a real-life newspaper and shit, gave a five-star review to The Battle Royale Slam Book—and it was actually a fairly lengthy review that quotes from the book. A nice surprise in these days of capsule after capsule. Newspapers have basically surrendered book-reviewing to blogs, which is why there is at least one shrieking meltdown on the part of either an author or a book blogger every week. Anyway, check out the book and be sure to vote for it for the Best Related Book Hugo next year. Now that the Hugos are utterly politicized, everything is permitted. Never too soon to beat the drums!

I'll be running another online writing class in in August, with LitReactor. So check that out if you want to learn why your stories are being rejected. That's what I'm good at.

Edge of Tomorrow

So, five-and-a-half years ago, at work, I was tasked with summarizing the book All You Need is Kill as a two-page treatment for our Hollywood office. At the top of it, I wrote "Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers."

And that little fragment is the most widely read and cited piece of writing I've ever put down, or ever will.

I saw the movie again with my co-workers, yesterday. They liked it. I still liked it. The book is better, of course. But it was very strange, thinking back to my meeting with producer Jason Hoffs in a little side room of the office soon after starting at Team Rocket, and being asked "Do you have any good ideas for movies [from the books you're acquiring]?" And I said something like, "Ideas for good movies?" and he said something like "No, good ideas for movies."

But as it turns out, they actually made a good movie anyway. And in Hollywood terms, six years from Whatcha got? to acclaimed tentpole release, but there it is.

Of course the story this weekend is that The Fault in Our Stars, which is being pitched as an underdog-type small movie will likely beat Edge of Tomorrow at the box office. Surely it will, but from my point of view, the movie based on the book that sold four million copies is hardly an underdog when up against the movie based on a book that sold a couple tens of thousands of copies. Of course EoT's nut is larger, given the type of film it is, and everyone is gunning for Cruise's star to finally finish falling. But we are selling many many copies of All You Need Is Kill in all editions, and I've benefitted materially from this success, even if my role was largely limited to that damned sentence fragment.

So I guess it is a good weekend.

You Fight, I Win

Science fiction's left flank: We need more diversity in fiction, like our own books we can't sell with people of color, international SF, the end of gender defaults, etc!


Science fiction's right flank: No, we need more action-packed exciting fiction about blowing stuff up! Not message fic that we're too stupid to read that bores dumb white dudes everybody!

Me:


In other words:

Cindy Sheehan for governor

I voted Cindy Sheehan for governor in today's primary. Straight PFP when they ran candidates, Green where they didn't, and for attorney general where neither PFP or Green ran I voted Libertarian since I figured he would at least not enthusiastically prosecute drug offenses.

Thanks to California's new top-two primary schemes, minor parties will be largely shut out, except on those occasions when an established millionaire politician decides to start a vanity party as a one-off. Given that San Fran nearly had a Green Party mayor in 2003, multiparty elections are important, and voting for minor parties is crucial in this election for anyone interested—in any political direction—for a future not completely dominated by either the Capital Party (Industrial/Media) or their opposing wing, the Capital Party (Financial/Agricultural).




I voted for Peace and Freedom. You likely voted for War and Slavery.

Blue Monday

I see that Jay has become posthumously LJ Famous, if there is such a thing anymore:



It's strange to wake up in the morning and not think, "Okay, time to get to the airport..." It's good to be home.

Here's a very positive review of my dayjob anthology The Battle Royale Slam Book, which you should totally buy and read if you are into BR, or cult film, or Japanese pop culture, or or or...well, anything!

My flash fiction "No Business Like" is now a little podcast read by Christy Varonfakis. Here's three minutes or so of listening pleasure, punctuated by gunfire, right here.