Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 39
March 12, 2014
No More Readings
Last month I saw Ian Rankin at a bookstore. I didn't spy on him; it was an event. Not a reading though—he doesn't do that. He just talked about his book, some other things that have happened to him recently or not so recently, and took some questions. I asked him why afterwards, and he explained that he is a writer, not an actor; that as a crime novelist to read even a few pages deeply into the book could ruin it for listeners; and he doesn't like.
Well, I agree with him. From now on, no more readings. No more than a page anyway. Just banter, which I am okay at. You can hear me banter next week at two events:
Nick Mamatas, Jim Nisbet, Sin Soracco, and Ken Wishnia: PM Press Crime Writers' Short-Fire Reading and Signing, Wednesday, March 19th at 7:00 pm at Borderlands Books.
Thursday, March 20th at 7pm: Radical fiction, mystery, and crime! With Ken Wishnia, Norman Nawrocki, Sin Soracco, Nick Mamatas, Owen Hill, and Summer Brenner. Thursday, March 20, 2014 - 19:00 at Bay Area Public School.
Well, I agree with him. From now on, no more readings. No more than a page anyway. Just banter, which I am okay at. You can hear me banter next week at two events:
Nick Mamatas, Jim Nisbet, Sin Soracco, and Ken Wishnia: PM Press Crime Writers' Short-Fire Reading and Signing, Wednesday, March 19th at 7:00 pm at Borderlands Books.
Thursday, March 20th at 7pm: Radical fiction, mystery, and crime! With Ken Wishnia, Norman Nawrocki, Sin Soracco, Nick Mamatas, Owen Hill, and Summer Brenner. Thursday, March 20, 2014 - 19:00 at Bay Area Public School.
March 7, 2014
MFA vs NYC vs Sci-Fi*
So, MFA vs NYC is an interesting book. Sure to be a classic, using the traditional definition of the word classic: an inaccurate work that everyone cites, riffs on, and otherwise tangles with. We'll be talking about MFA vs NYC in the way we talk about McWorld vs Jihad, or red state vs blue state.
The book is an anthology of essays about either MFA programs, or working as a writer or in publishing in New York City, or a few other related topics. Several of the essays are already online—Alexander Chee's and Emily Gould's personal essays are easy to find (the latter was widely linked to because it is about a person who made and then lost a lot of money), and the essay about the CIA's influence on MFA programs everyone was talking about a few weeks ago is also in here. Plus, there are older reprints; you can cobble together around half the book if you're a diligent Googler. There are newer pieces as well, not all of them personal essays. The best piece is probably Frederic Jameson's dismantling of The Program Era, which was the MFA book everyone was talking about three years ago.
One doesn't review MFA vs NYC—one reviews one's own life after reading it. I'm NYC. I started publishing with the first dot com boom; I got small pieces in New York-region content plays Feed and Disinfo.com, and parlayed that into writing regularly for the Village Voice (even getting a personal essay in there my first time out) and various magazines that were popular in the city then: Silicon Alley Reporter and Artbyte and others I hardly remember. Artsier stuff appeared in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, which paid in prestige, and also reprinted in prestige, as I have an essay in Before and After: Stories from New York, in the before section (this will be important later). I also edited books for Soft Skull Press when it was run out of a basement (and into the ground) by Sander Hicks. So, New York. I didn't have a full-time day job in publishing and wasn't making huge bucks; I was a term paper artist and living in Jersey City, which despite being in the wrong state is closer to Manhattan than most of Brooklyn and Queens.
Then, 9/11. Many magazines died on 9/12, claiming that their incoming checks had been destroyed along with the Post Office near the World Trade Center. The economy had collapsed the previous April, so the writing was already on the wall. The spine of Fast Company was everyone's barometer as it went from phonebook-sized to a slim pamphlet. But it was 9/11 that ended my NYC play. The sort of politics I wished to write about were destroyed, as I found out when the Voice killed a piece I was working on about the conflict between the antiwar movement and the pro-war "antiwar" movement. The latter floated as its slogan "Justice, Not Vengeance", which simply ceded the debate to pro-war forces. (PS: so many years later, everything the actual antiwar movement said came to pass, so we were right and you all were wrong.) The dot com money went up in smoke too, and as more people started learning to navigate the Internet, I lost interest in writing about it. Reportage could become service journalism too easily.
I concentrated on fiction, and for a while was all over the place: science fiction and horror, yes, but several of my early stories appeared in men's magazines like Razor, and in scene-y little zine-ys like Rag Shock. (Scene-y enough that it is nigh impossible to Google!) I started this blog, and began focusing more on genre publishing since, frankly, it's the sort of fiction one is allowed to publish without a pedigree. I'm not from a wealthy or even middle-class family, and though we're recent immigrants, Greece is without cachet in NYC publishing. Plus, we were poor in Greece too! Anyway, in 2004 I left New York and that DQed me as an NYCer. It really is impossible to keep up with the scene from the outside, even with the Internet.
I eventually got an MFA, after publishing a couple of books and a few dozen stories, but it was with a low-res program with a commercial/professional orientation, and thus doesn't count as "being MFA." It helped primarily in that Japanese firms like advanced degrees, and I got my job at VIZ, my first-ever full-time job, soon after graduating, at a good-for-publishing salary partially because of the degree.
So...the book? Yes, of course, the book! Some good stuff. There aren't two cultures to American fiction, but NYC and MFA are two of the cultures of American fiction, I am convinced. A third culture would be genre fiction. A fourth, as hinted at in the piece about judging Amazon's Breakthrough Contest, might be self-publishing. I would count prose poetry as a separate culture as well, despite its association with MFAs simply by being a species of poetry. (Prose poetry is like the plain-dressing Mennonites who look like Amish but get to use lightbulbs...of American fiction.) This title does capture the essence of the two cultures, both of which are teleological—they exist for the end of creating writer identities. Books? Ehh. Is there an emoji for waggling a hand as if to say "Maybe, maybe not"?
NYC creates writer identities the threshing floor of shit jobs, the intermittent feedback of windfall freelance paydays, and real estate prices that keep even writers with six-figure advances poor, sometimes desperately so. Partners Emily Gould and Keith Gessen gained first-novel advances of $200,000 and $160,000** within a couple of years of one another, and they ended up together, broke, anyway. Only partially thanks to their sick cat Raffles (RIP). It is not possible to be a starving writer in New York City; you just starve, or you write and make good*** by landing a real job in publishing or periodicals. Or you leave, of course.
MFAs do this via pre-selection—where you go is what's more important than anything else. If you want to teach, you need a book, but you also need to be a graduate from a higher tier school, as you will only be allowed to teach at schools with less renown than the one from which you hold a degree. Get a low-res MFA for the teaching credential, and you had either make a big splash with your novel, or you'll end up a perennial adjunct at even shittier schools or working at a community college. The psychodrama of the workshop is also important, because here is where your writerly identity (not the work itself, not skill) is forged. It's how you develop taste, and how you learn to live cheaply in chockful-of-snore college towns, and how to deal with bureaucracies.
The book is full of complaints, which is no surprise since American fiction is in pretty sad shape. One fellow fumes that at his adjunct gig, he had to talk seriously about orcs with a student. Another, an agent with seventy-five clients, complains that most submissions he receives aren't very good. (Dude, you can stop reading them if you have seventy-five clients already!) MFAs tend to be happier, because they only fall victim to human gurus such as Gordon Lish. Even the most narcissistic man is much more caring than the entirely uncaring, even malefic, island of Manhattan.
A number of the essays could have in fact been blog posts. The pieces are separated by quotes from other writers discussing their own time in NYC or an MFA program. These look like nothing more than frequently reblogged tumblr memes, minus the cat pictures. The Internet has already taken over American non-fiction; the two cultures are Listicle and Long Read, and the writers here are really engaging in that struggle, not in the struggle between the MFA and the NYC.
MFA vs NYC is actually a rearguard action against the Internet, which has radically distributed the writer identity. Talk to a kid, and you might get the name of a fanfic writer as his or her favorite. And it's not just kids; a fanfic writer, E. L. James, is the most successful published writer of the last several years. Everyone reads and writes constantly, even if just tweets and tumblrs and YouTube comments. Did you know that you're a fag and you suck, fag? Oh no, is that last sentence snark or smarm? Nobody cares; identity-writers are concerned with that stuff. By pinning a tail on the donkeys of MFA and NYC, the book is asking its readers to chose an army, so that we can have a pretend war and thus be distracted from the fact that there are people putting poorly conceptualized and poorly written serial-killer novels on Kindle for a buck and becoming millionaires with "fans."
Both NYCs and MFAs want readers, not fans. What they get instead, given the dominance and ubiquity of the Internet, is the chance to daydream that they had been solicited for MFA vs NYC.
*"Sci-Fi" as a term is both an NYCism and MFAism these days. People inside the genre call it SF, of course. But people outside the genre, especially in San Francisco, see those two letters and think of the city. Thus the reading I attended once where Kim Stanley Robinson was introduced as one of "the most innovative writers of San Francisco novels."
**By way of contrast, my first novel advance was $3000, from an independent press run by two guys in two different apartments in San Francisco and Portland. The highest advance I ever got was $14,000, for an anthology for which I had a co-editor, and that required us to pay our contributors out of our advance. So I got to keep about 25 percent of that $14,000. Ten years after my first novel, subsequent advances have ranged from $500 to $6000, and I'm now writing a novel for one of the co-founders of my first novel's publisher—he's still paying $3000. In my NYC days, there were articles I earned $3000 from writing. Most of the ninety-five or so short stories I've published have paid somewhere between a nickel and a dime a word, or between $100 and $1000 depending on length, with a big cluster at around $250. Occasionally, I've licked $1500-$2000 for short stories, but only after multiple reprints or when cracking one of the rare markets that pays very well: a men's magazine, a Best American volume, Tor.com. For NYCs and MFAs, most short fiction is just a favor you do for someone you hope will be in a position to help you one day.
***You know you've made good when you eat at the same good restaurant, at the same table, every day. Dinner is better than lunch, but with the collapse of publishing as we know it, lunch will do.
The book is an anthology of essays about either MFA programs, or working as a writer or in publishing in New York City, or a few other related topics. Several of the essays are already online—Alexander Chee's and Emily Gould's personal essays are easy to find (the latter was widely linked to because it is about a person who made and then lost a lot of money), and the essay about the CIA's influence on MFA programs everyone was talking about a few weeks ago is also in here. Plus, there are older reprints; you can cobble together around half the book if you're a diligent Googler. There are newer pieces as well, not all of them personal essays. The best piece is probably Frederic Jameson's dismantling of The Program Era, which was the MFA book everyone was talking about three years ago.
One doesn't review MFA vs NYC—one reviews one's own life after reading it. I'm NYC. I started publishing with the first dot com boom; I got small pieces in New York-region content plays Feed and Disinfo.com, and parlayed that into writing regularly for the Village Voice (even getting a personal essay in there my first time out) and various magazines that were popular in the city then: Silicon Alley Reporter and Artbyte and others I hardly remember. Artsier stuff appeared in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, which paid in prestige, and also reprinted in prestige, as I have an essay in Before and After: Stories from New York, in the before section (this will be important later). I also edited books for Soft Skull Press when it was run out of a basement (and into the ground) by Sander Hicks. So, New York. I didn't have a full-time day job in publishing and wasn't making huge bucks; I was a term paper artist and living in Jersey City, which despite being in the wrong state is closer to Manhattan than most of Brooklyn and Queens.
Then, 9/11. Many magazines died on 9/12, claiming that their incoming checks had been destroyed along with the Post Office near the World Trade Center. The economy had collapsed the previous April, so the writing was already on the wall. The spine of Fast Company was everyone's barometer as it went from phonebook-sized to a slim pamphlet. But it was 9/11 that ended my NYC play. The sort of politics I wished to write about were destroyed, as I found out when the Voice killed a piece I was working on about the conflict between the antiwar movement and the pro-war "antiwar" movement. The latter floated as its slogan "Justice, Not Vengeance", which simply ceded the debate to pro-war forces. (PS: so many years later, everything the actual antiwar movement said came to pass, so we were right and you all were wrong.) The dot com money went up in smoke too, and as more people started learning to navigate the Internet, I lost interest in writing about it. Reportage could become service journalism too easily.
I concentrated on fiction, and for a while was all over the place: science fiction and horror, yes, but several of my early stories appeared in men's magazines like Razor, and in scene-y little zine-ys like Rag Shock. (Scene-y enough that it is nigh impossible to Google!) I started this blog, and began focusing more on genre publishing since, frankly, it's the sort of fiction one is allowed to publish without a pedigree. I'm not from a wealthy or even middle-class family, and though we're recent immigrants, Greece is without cachet in NYC publishing. Plus, we were poor in Greece too! Anyway, in 2004 I left New York and that DQed me as an NYCer. It really is impossible to keep up with the scene from the outside, even with the Internet.
I eventually got an MFA, after publishing a couple of books and a few dozen stories, but it was with a low-res program with a commercial/professional orientation, and thus doesn't count as "being MFA." It helped primarily in that Japanese firms like advanced degrees, and I got my job at VIZ, my first-ever full-time job, soon after graduating, at a good-for-publishing salary partially because of the degree.
So...the book? Yes, of course, the book! Some good stuff. There aren't two cultures to American fiction, but NYC and MFA are two of the cultures of American fiction, I am convinced. A third culture would be genre fiction. A fourth, as hinted at in the piece about judging Amazon's Breakthrough Contest, might be self-publishing. I would count prose poetry as a separate culture as well, despite its association with MFAs simply by being a species of poetry. (Prose poetry is like the plain-dressing Mennonites who look like Amish but get to use lightbulbs...of American fiction.) This title does capture the essence of the two cultures, both of which are teleological—they exist for the end of creating writer identities. Books? Ehh. Is there an emoji for waggling a hand as if to say "Maybe, maybe not"?
NYC creates writer identities the threshing floor of shit jobs, the intermittent feedback of windfall freelance paydays, and real estate prices that keep even writers with six-figure advances poor, sometimes desperately so. Partners Emily Gould and Keith Gessen gained first-novel advances of $200,000 and $160,000** within a couple of years of one another, and they ended up together, broke, anyway. Only partially thanks to their sick cat Raffles (RIP). It is not possible to be a starving writer in New York City; you just starve, or you write and make good*** by landing a real job in publishing or periodicals. Or you leave, of course.
MFAs do this via pre-selection—where you go is what's more important than anything else. If you want to teach, you need a book, but you also need to be a graduate from a higher tier school, as you will only be allowed to teach at schools with less renown than the one from which you hold a degree. Get a low-res MFA for the teaching credential, and you had either make a big splash with your novel, or you'll end up a perennial adjunct at even shittier schools or working at a community college. The psychodrama of the workshop is also important, because here is where your writerly identity (not the work itself, not skill) is forged. It's how you develop taste, and how you learn to live cheaply in chockful-of-snore college towns, and how to deal with bureaucracies.
The book is full of complaints, which is no surprise since American fiction is in pretty sad shape. One fellow fumes that at his adjunct gig, he had to talk seriously about orcs with a student. Another, an agent with seventy-five clients, complains that most submissions he receives aren't very good. (Dude, you can stop reading them if you have seventy-five clients already!) MFAs tend to be happier, because they only fall victim to human gurus such as Gordon Lish. Even the most narcissistic man is much more caring than the entirely uncaring, even malefic, island of Manhattan.
A number of the essays could have in fact been blog posts. The pieces are separated by quotes from other writers discussing their own time in NYC or an MFA program. These look like nothing more than frequently reblogged tumblr memes, minus the cat pictures. The Internet has already taken over American non-fiction; the two cultures are Listicle and Long Read, and the writers here are really engaging in that struggle, not in the struggle between the MFA and the NYC.
MFA vs NYC is actually a rearguard action against the Internet, which has radically distributed the writer identity. Talk to a kid, and you might get the name of a fanfic writer as his or her favorite. And it's not just kids; a fanfic writer, E. L. James, is the most successful published writer of the last several years. Everyone reads and writes constantly, even if just tweets and tumblrs and YouTube comments. Did you know that you're a fag and you suck, fag? Oh no, is that last sentence snark or smarm? Nobody cares; identity-writers are concerned with that stuff. By pinning a tail on the donkeys of MFA and NYC, the book is asking its readers to chose an army, so that we can have a pretend war and thus be distracted from the fact that there are people putting poorly conceptualized and poorly written serial-killer novels on Kindle for a buck and becoming millionaires with "fans."
Both NYCs and MFAs want readers, not fans. What they get instead, given the dominance and ubiquity of the Internet, is the chance to daydream that they had been solicited for MFA vs NYC.
*"Sci-Fi" as a term is both an NYCism and MFAism these days. People inside the genre call it SF, of course. But people outside the genre, especially in San Francisco, see those two letters and think of the city. Thus the reading I attended once where Kim Stanley Robinson was introduced as one of "the most innovative writers of San Francisco novels."
**By way of contrast, my first novel advance was $3000, from an independent press run by two guys in two different apartments in San Francisco and Portland. The highest advance I ever got was $14,000, for an anthology for which I had a co-editor, and that required us to pay our contributors out of our advance. So I got to keep about 25 percent of that $14,000. Ten years after my first novel, subsequent advances have ranged from $500 to $6000, and I'm now writing a novel for one of the co-founders of my first novel's publisher—he's still paying $3000. In my NYC days, there were articles I earned $3000 from writing. Most of the ninety-five or so short stories I've published have paid somewhere between a nickel and a dime a word, or between $100 and $1000 depending on length, with a big cluster at around $250. Occasionally, I've licked $1500-$2000 for short stories, but only after multiple reprints or when cracking one of the rare markets that pays very well: a men's magazine, a Best American volume, Tor.com. For NYCs and MFAs, most short fiction is just a favor you do for someone you hope will be in a position to help you one day.
***You know you've made good when you eat at the same good restaurant, at the same table, every day. Dinner is better than lunch, but with the collapse of publishing as we know it, lunch will do.
March 5, 2014
Wednesday Quick Notes
Oh boy, let's see!
The latest issue of The Big Click is out. Rebecca Ore, and much much more. It's our second anniversary issue as well, so if you were waiting to see if we had staying before before subscribing, we do have it, so subscribe.
My Writing Salon course starts up again this Saturday, so if you're local to Berkeley and want to learn how to write, or at least what the hell is wrong with you...uh, your writing, why not sign up?
Oh, and here's a tip. For me anyway, it is very frustrating to see writers of various calibers whine about opportunities and the lack thereof, and then clam up when I solicit something from them because it's too hard or not exactly in their wheelhouse or or or... Sometimes I even complain about this, on Twitter or Facebook, which is where all my short exhalations go these days. Anyway, if you see one of those little fits, here's a good way to react:
A short private message. It exudes confidence and enthusiasm, without begging, throwing around bona fides (which may work against you, especially if you're either a beginner or just terrible—a lot of terrible people writers follow me on social media) or extended rhetoric or questions. And, for the love of God, no reference to one's self as "a content creator"! Just a rhetorical Yes. And if what I'm offering is a bad fit, you can always turn your yes into a no with no hard feelings.
With me anyway, that's how you do it. And that's why Carrie Cuinn has, after a few rounds of edits, an essay in The Battle Royale Slam Book.
The latest issue of The Big Click is out. Rebecca Ore, and much much more. It's our second anniversary issue as well, so if you were waiting to see if we had staying before before subscribing, we do have it, so subscribe.
My Writing Salon course starts up again this Saturday, so if you're local to Berkeley and want to learn how to write, or at least what the hell is wrong with you...uh, your writing, why not sign up?
Oh, and here's a tip. For me anyway, it is very frustrating to see writers of various calibers whine about opportunities and the lack thereof, and then clam up when I solicit something from them because it's too hard or not exactly in their wheelhouse or or or... Sometimes I even complain about this, on Twitter or Facebook, which is where all my short exhalations go these days. Anyway, if you see one of those little fits, here's a good way to react:
A short private message. It exudes confidence and enthusiasm, without begging, throwing around bona fides (which may work against you, especially if you're either a beginner or just terrible—a lot of terrible people writers follow me on social media) or extended rhetoric or questions. And, for the love of God, no reference to one's self as "a content creator"! Just a rhetorical Yes. And if what I'm offering is a bad fit, you can always turn your yes into a no with no hard feelings.
With me anyway, that's how you do it. And that's why Carrie Cuinn has, after a few rounds of edits, an essay in The Battle Royale Slam Book.
March 3, 2014
AWP
Back from AWP. Slammed, of course, and LJ is slow-loading today, I presume due to the crisis in Crimea. (Hint: if you were ever in favor of US invasions of Haiti, Afghanistan, or Iraq, try not to break your hand wagging your finger at the Russians.)
Anyway, I went to AWP this weekend, and had fun. People liked my panel talk, and I got what I believe to be the traditional compliment: "You should publish that." I hung out with the mainstream science fiction people, the radicals, the bizarros, and the kids at Westconn who are launching an online journal called Poor Yorick. (I've already made them agree to meet with me at the next residency to talk fundraising and paying their contributors.) Met Le Guin too!
And I was especially sad to miss this event.
Mostly I tweeted everything. I also picked up a few books, including MFA vs NYC, about which I will have more to say in the near future.
Anyway, I went to AWP this weekend, and had fun. People liked my panel talk, and I got what I believe to be the traditional compliment: "You should publish that." I hung out with the mainstream science fiction people, the radicals, the bizarros, and the kids at Westconn who are launching an online journal called Poor Yorick. (I've already made them agree to meet with me at the next residency to talk fundraising and paying their contributors.) Met Le Guin too!
And I was especially sad to miss this event.
Mostly I tweeted everything. I also picked up a few books, including MFA vs NYC, about which I will have more to say in the near future.
February 26, 2014
AWP
Off to Seattle for the AWP conference. Last year, I livetweeted a bunch of nutty panels, but this year the programming is far more reasonable—by which I mean there didn't seem to be a panel on how sometimes groovy it is when a student falls in love with you.*
I'll be on a panel this year!
Friday, 10:30-11:45am, Room LL4, Western New England MFA Annex, Lower Level:
F156. Give Me Your Vampires, Your Fae, Your Bulbous Alien Masses Yearning to Breathe Free. (Rachel Swirsky, Rahul Kanakia, Brooke Wonders, Nick Mamatas) Realist and experimental fiction writers often express nervousness about allowing their undergraduates to submit fantasy and science fiction to workshop. Some go so far as to ban such work outright, a tactic that can defuse young writers’ enthusiasm. Join writers whose work has appeared in both literary and genre publications as they discuss how a successful undergraduate workshop can include teaching serious genre fiction.
Some come see that. Copies of Love is the Law will be available on the Lazy Fascist table, and it's likely that a couple copies of Sensation will be at the PM Press table. Aaaw yeah.
*Not kidding: R248. Eros in the Classroom. (Heather McNaugher, Michele Morano, BK Loren, Eileen Myles, Barrie Jean Borich) More than a few academic careers in literature and writing were ignited by a crush on a teacher. But desire in the classroom is constructed, often for good reason, as threatening and inappropriate; we therefore don’t acknowledge or talk about it. This panel, inspired by Michele Morano’s recent Ninth Letter essay, “Crush,” speaks plainly and honestly about the overlap of desire and pedagogy, and how the writer-teacher has constructively channeled it into her/his creative work.
I'll be on a panel this year!
Friday, 10:30-11:45am, Room LL4, Western New England MFA Annex, Lower Level:
F156. Give Me Your Vampires, Your Fae, Your Bulbous Alien Masses Yearning to Breathe Free. (Rachel Swirsky, Rahul Kanakia, Brooke Wonders, Nick Mamatas) Realist and experimental fiction writers often express nervousness about allowing their undergraduates to submit fantasy and science fiction to workshop. Some go so far as to ban such work outright, a tactic that can defuse young writers’ enthusiasm. Join writers whose work has appeared in both literary and genre publications as they discuss how a successful undergraduate workshop can include teaching serious genre fiction.
Some come see that. Copies of Love is the Law will be available on the Lazy Fascist table, and it's likely that a couple copies of Sensation will be at the PM Press table. Aaaw yeah.
*Not kidding: R248. Eros in the Classroom. (Heather McNaugher, Michele Morano, BK Loren, Eileen Myles, Barrie Jean Borich) More than a few academic careers in literature and writing were ignited by a crush on a teacher. But desire in the classroom is constructed, often for good reason, as threatening and inappropriate; we therefore don’t acknowledge or talk about it. This panel, inspired by Michele Morano’s recent Ninth Letter essay, “Crush,” speaks plainly and honestly about the overlap of desire and pedagogy, and how the writer-teacher has constructively channeled it into her/his creative work.
February 25, 2014
And now, the real reason for all those SFWA dust-ups.
The Nebula Award nominees.
Whoever controls the organization, controls the awards! Imagine being a tedious old gasbag who spent decades pressing the flesh at conventions, who stayed up all night listening to someone go on about the Even Older Days...think of the amount of energy expended cranking out mimeographs, and sending paper letters to remind people of what good friends you are...and then came GEnie and it was like living in the future, and one time you had a bumper sticker with your name on it because you were running for city council on the Libertarian Party ticket on a non-compromise platform of demunicipalizing garbage collection and prize-based asteroid mining and then and then...
GIRLS with BLOGS show up and TAKE OVER. And the bitches don't even giggle and blush when you call them "pooky" and tell them to come up to your room for a private meeting where you will give them all the inside dirt on "selling stories to Gardner"...
NoooooooooooooooooooOO!
Whoever controls the organization, controls the awards! Imagine being a tedious old gasbag who spent decades pressing the flesh at conventions, who stayed up all night listening to someone go on about the Even Older Days...think of the amount of energy expended cranking out mimeographs, and sending paper letters to remind people of what good friends you are...and then came GEnie and it was like living in the future, and one time you had a bumper sticker with your name on it because you were running for city council on the Libertarian Party ticket on a non-compromise platform of demunicipalizing garbage collection and prize-based asteroid mining and then and then...
GIRLS with BLOGS show up and TAKE OVER. And the bitches don't even giggle and blush when you call them "pooky" and tell them to come up to your room for a private meeting where you will give them all the inside dirt on "selling stories to Gardner"...
NoooooooooooooooooooOO!
February 20, 2014
Today I am 42
First one to comment with a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy joke wins*!
*A punch in the face.
*A punch in the face.
February 19, 2014
Here's an extremely trivial problem...
Back when LiveJournal was popular, people used to read this blog. The height of LJ's success paralleled my "career"—that is, I was home, in front of my computer all the time, cranking out term papers and other scutwork, and trying to write stories and the occasional novel. So I was able to "feed the Web" as we used to say in the 1990s. My day job started in mid-2008, about the time Facebook came roaring past MySpace (which I rarely ever used; too ugly!) to become the dominant social media platform. Which was fine, as I had less time to post four or five "Hey, look at this dumb picture/news story" type LJ posts anyway. Facebook was better for that sort of thing, once one learns whom to hide from.
But years of this journal being popular meant that "editors" decided to take me seriously. By editors, I mean people trying to launch online magazines or fill small press anthologies. I've been in my first issues of now defunct webzines than someone like me should be, but only because I'd link to the site—yay, readers!—when I was published, and because I was easy to reach and have a knack for making deadlines. Some of the "editors" may have even thought I was good. Whatever, money was money.
Then in 2008, Lovecraft Unbound came out, and my story in it "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" confused lots of people who weren't used to that kind of thing in their Lovecraftian fiction. I also did an interview in which someone asked me about being a Lovecraftian writer and I said I didn't think I was one because I never got solicited for Lovecraftian anthologies, was never invited to attend Lovecraftian events as a guest, etc etc. Naturally, the solicitations and invitations started trickling in after that.
Also, my day job kept me busy, but it also pays well enough that I didn't have to hunt for scutwork anymore. So I became a far more productive novelist, thanks to having free evenings. Not productive in the genre sense of shitting out three novels a year and having two ongoing series and then doing work-for-hit as well or keeping a pseudonym or two active or throwing five books a year on Kindle, but reasonably prolific for the sort of writer I am. That is, the writer nobody reads. So, none of my novels make anyone any money, but people like me my work this blog me enough to give me a chance or two. We also entered a golden moment of anthology production in the last few years. Indeed, probably the only major anthology not to make money in this era was my own Haunted Legends. (Also, that was the only time I acquiesced to being published by a Big Six publisher. So much for the bigger-is-better theory.)
Of course, this all happens as everyone decides that "platform" and "brand" are important for a writer, and when the main tentpole of my "platform", this blog, stops attracting so many readers. The venue was collapsing and the content became much less interesting once I could only occasionally manage to write something good.
My A material, that went to Twitter. See?
Did I say A material? Well, my C- material. (The A material ended up in Starve Better. I remember Jason from Apex asking me to blurb something and I gave my usual warning that blurbs in general don't sell books and that my name in particular never ever sells books and he said, "Then why did you sell me your writing book!" But in the end SB made a few bucks, I think.)
So anyway, what I ended up with is a lot more to promote—nine or so anthology appearances per year, plus sometimes a book and sometimes three or four books, plus my dayjob stuff. Much less time to talk about the situation in Ukraine for example, which is more complex than either the riot porn aficionados and anti-fash groups will have you believe. (Fascists in favor of the EU? Hmmm. Of course, once the US decides to back the Right Sector, the non-fascist elements will be marginalized; America always loves a strongman...) And more need to do tedious shit like tell you to take my writing class! etc.
This all came to a head last year when, baby on the way, I agreed to take part in a pair of Kickstarted anthologies. Both of which were very similar in a few ways: they failed (ha-ha!), there was a 'content' guy and a 'marketing' guy involved, there was no real reason for the book to exist other than someone thinking that if all those other books can get $30,000 after asking for $10,000 I can too, and the writers solicited were inexplicable.
Or, to put it another way, no matter how cosmopolitan a reader you are, there is no way you can think that I am a good writer and that Mike Resnick or Kevin J. Anderson are also good writers. You either think I am a good writer and they're just popular, or that they're good writers and I have a blog people read.
Well, I don't, suckers. Outside of the occasional big post, I'm talking into an empty can. See, I can link to something like Black Wings of Cthulhu II (a reprint of the limited edition, with my story "Dead Media" in it) or the forthcoming Searchers After Horror (which contains my story "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which I am excited enough about I've thought about signing up for Medium.com in order to reprint it myself for a big digital audience once I have the rights to do so), and how many people will click through? Maybe ten. Maybe one will pre-order, or wishlist, or whatnot. On Facebook, I might get a bunch of likes, cuz likes are free. I like all sorts of things on Facebook, like pictures of ugly children.
Anyway, part of the reason I "retired" is that I decided that I was in danger of becoming a "good hand"—someone known for making deadlines, who can be asked to fill in a slot for this or that anthology. And if nobody actually reads the anthologies, well, we'll just stop publishing them, finally. It's always been extremely easy for me to write on a theme, especially given the competition. (My first thought isn't the same first thought that a dozen other writers have.) But clearly, for my own aesthetic goals, I need to stop doing theme work. Of course, I just started writing a novel based on a theme an editor gave me, but who can blame me for that—I have income taxes to pay in April!
But years of this journal being popular meant that "editors" decided to take me seriously. By editors, I mean people trying to launch online magazines or fill small press anthologies. I've been in my first issues of now defunct webzines than someone like me should be, but only because I'd link to the site—yay, readers!—when I was published, and because I was easy to reach and have a knack for making deadlines. Some of the "editors" may have even thought I was good. Whatever, money was money.
Then in 2008, Lovecraft Unbound came out, and my story in it "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" confused lots of people who weren't used to that kind of thing in their Lovecraftian fiction. I also did an interview in which someone asked me about being a Lovecraftian writer and I said I didn't think I was one because I never got solicited for Lovecraftian anthologies, was never invited to attend Lovecraftian events as a guest, etc etc. Naturally, the solicitations and invitations started trickling in after that.
Also, my day job kept me busy, but it also pays well enough that I didn't have to hunt for scutwork anymore. So I became a far more productive novelist, thanks to having free evenings. Not productive in the genre sense of shitting out three novels a year and having two ongoing series and then doing work-for-hit as well or keeping a pseudonym or two active or throwing five books a year on Kindle, but reasonably prolific for the sort of writer I am. That is, the writer nobody reads. So, none of my novels make anyone any money, but people like me my work this blog me enough to give me a chance or two. We also entered a golden moment of anthology production in the last few years. Indeed, probably the only major anthology not to make money in this era was my own Haunted Legends. (Also, that was the only time I acquiesced to being published by a Big Six publisher. So much for the bigger-is-better theory.)
Of course, this all happens as everyone decides that "platform" and "brand" are important for a writer, and when the main tentpole of my "platform", this blog, stops attracting so many readers. The venue was collapsing and the content became much less interesting once I could only occasionally manage to write something good.
My A material, that went to Twitter. See?
Both #sfwa "rabid weasels" and "insect army" are getting T-shirts. This happens when you don't call people "Hefty bags full of shit."
— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) February 18, 2014
Did I say A material? Well, my C- material. (The A material ended up in Starve Better. I remember Jason from Apex asking me to blurb something and I gave my usual warning that blurbs in general don't sell books and that my name in particular never ever sells books and he said, "Then why did you sell me your writing book!" But in the end SB made a few bucks, I think.)
So anyway, what I ended up with is a lot more to promote—nine or so anthology appearances per year, plus sometimes a book and sometimes three or four books, plus my dayjob stuff. Much less time to talk about the situation in Ukraine for example, which is more complex than either the riot porn aficionados and anti-fash groups will have you believe. (Fascists in favor of the EU? Hmmm. Of course, once the US decides to back the Right Sector, the non-fascist elements will be marginalized; America always loves a strongman...) And more need to do tedious shit like tell you to take my writing class! etc.
This all came to a head last year when, baby on the way, I agreed to take part in a pair of Kickstarted anthologies. Both of which were very similar in a few ways: they failed (ha-ha!), there was a 'content' guy and a 'marketing' guy involved, there was no real reason for the book to exist other than someone thinking that if all those other books can get $30,000 after asking for $10,000 I can too, and the writers solicited were inexplicable.
Or, to put it another way, no matter how cosmopolitan a reader you are, there is no way you can think that I am a good writer and that Mike Resnick or Kevin J. Anderson are also good writers. You either think I am a good writer and they're just popular, or that they're good writers and I have a blog people read.
Well, I don't, suckers. Outside of the occasional big post, I'm talking into an empty can. See, I can link to something like Black Wings of Cthulhu II (a reprint of the limited edition, with my story "Dead Media" in it) or the forthcoming Searchers After Horror (which contains my story "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which I am excited enough about I've thought about signing up for Medium.com in order to reprint it myself for a big digital audience once I have the rights to do so), and how many people will click through? Maybe ten. Maybe one will pre-order, or wishlist, or whatnot. On Facebook, I might get a bunch of likes, cuz likes are free. I like all sorts of things on Facebook, like pictures of ugly children.
Anyway, part of the reason I "retired" is that I decided that I was in danger of becoming a "good hand"—someone known for making deadlines, who can be asked to fill in a slot for this or that anthology. And if nobody actually reads the anthologies, well, we'll just stop publishing them, finally. It's always been extremely easy for me to write on a theme, especially given the competition. (My first thought isn't the same first thought that a dozen other writers have.) But clearly, for my own aesthetic goals, I need to stop doing theme work. Of course, I just started writing a novel based on a theme an editor gave me, but who can blame me for that—I have income taxes to pay in April!
February 14, 2014
THE BATTLE ROYALE SLAM BOOK: ESSAYS ON KOUSHUN TAKAMI'S CULT CLASSIC
My latest dayjob anthology, The Battle Royale Slam Book, is now available for pre-order. See?
And now, the table of contents:
Introduction
Blood in the Classroom, Blood on the Page: Will Battle Royale Ever Be on the Test?
Nick Mamatas
Death For Kids
John Skipp
Battle Royale: The Fight the Night Before
Masao Higashi
Happiest Days of Your Life: Battle Royale and School Fiction
Adam Roberts
Innocence Lost and Regained: Bradbury, Takami, and the Cult of the Child
Kathleen Miller
From Dangerous to Desirable: Battle Royale and the Gendering of Youth Culture
Raechel Dumas
Girl Power
Carrie Cuinn
Over the Top, Or Over the Top Rope?:
Battle Royale and Japan’s Love of Professional Wrestling
Jason S. Ridler
Battle Royale—Generational Warfare
Kostas Paradias
Killer Kids in Jeopardy: Hollywood’s Horror Taboo
Gregory Lamberson
Seeing the Sequel First: Teenage Memories of Battle Royale II
Isamu Fukui
Dead Sexy: A Defense of Sexuality in the Violently Visual Battle Royale Manga
Steven R. Stewart
The Postwar Child’s Guide to Survival
Nadia Bulkin
Children Playing With Guns
Brian Keene
List, Combination, Recursion
Toh EnJoe
Bueller, Bueller, Do You Read?
Random Notes on Battle Royale and the American Teen Film
Sam Hamm
Whatever You Encounter, Slay It At Once: Battle Royale as Zen Parable
Douglas F. Warrick
So check it out!
PS: is it too soon to point out that this book is eligible for a Best Related Book Hugo in 2015? Is it, huh huh, is it?
And now, the table of contents:
Introduction
Blood in the Classroom, Blood on the Page: Will Battle Royale Ever Be on the Test?
Nick Mamatas
Death For Kids
John Skipp
Battle Royale: The Fight the Night Before
Masao Higashi
Happiest Days of Your Life: Battle Royale and School Fiction
Adam Roberts
Innocence Lost and Regained: Bradbury, Takami, and the Cult of the Child
Kathleen Miller
From Dangerous to Desirable: Battle Royale and the Gendering of Youth Culture
Raechel Dumas
Girl Power
Carrie Cuinn
Over the Top, Or Over the Top Rope?:
Battle Royale and Japan’s Love of Professional Wrestling
Jason S. Ridler
Battle Royale—Generational Warfare
Kostas Paradias
Killer Kids in Jeopardy: Hollywood’s Horror Taboo
Gregory Lamberson
Seeing the Sequel First: Teenage Memories of Battle Royale II
Isamu Fukui
Dead Sexy: A Defense of Sexuality in the Violently Visual Battle Royale Manga
Steven R. Stewart
The Postwar Child’s Guide to Survival
Nadia Bulkin
Children Playing With Guns
Brian Keene
List, Combination, Recursion
Toh EnJoe
Bueller, Bueller, Do You Read?
Random Notes on Battle Royale and the American Teen Film
Sam Hamm
Whatever You Encounter, Slay It At Once: Battle Royale as Zen Parable
Douglas F. Warrick
So check it out!
PS: is it too soon to point out that this book is eligible for a Best Related Book Hugo in 2015? Is it, huh huh, is it?
Happy Valentine's Day!
Roses are red
Your lips are red
The walls are red
EVERYTHING RED
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