S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 3
September 2, 2019
ARC Giveaway and Big Changes in my Writing Career!
Coming soon to Amazon.com2019 will mark a couple of significant changes in the writing career of S. Andrew Swann, prompting me to offer an ARC giveaway.
The first major event, unfortunately, I can’t really talk about. All I can say is that it’s a very exciting opportunity! The people I’m working with have their own publicity machines, and I shouldn’t get out ahead of their announcements. Stay tuned!
The second event I can talk about. I’m officially going indie, or at least hybrid since I’m going to keep having stuff traditionally published by DAW Books. I’ve taken my book Teek, which has been out of print for a decade, revised it, and put it up on Amazon to go on sale October 15th. There will be an e-book and a paperback edition. Most importantly, it’s being released under my S. Andrew Swann byline. I’ll be releasing more of my back-list this way over the coming year. Look for Omega Game, Stranger Inside and God’s Dice in the future. The hope is that, by the time the project I vaguely referenced above is complete, I’ll be releasing original work, as well as my back-list. (One of the new things I may put out is that unsold novel I was talking about here a few years ago.)
If you want, you can actually help out with my journey as an indie. I’m putting together an ARC team of avid readers. If you join, you get an advance copy of the new version of Teek and, in return, you agree to put up an honest review on Amazon once Teek goes live. You’ll also get on my ARC-only mailing list so you’ll get reminders when the book goes live on Amazon, and notifications when I do this with future books. If you’re interested in the ARC giveaway, drop me an e-mail at author@sandrewswann.com.
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July 29, 2019
Goodbye, Joe.
This past Friday we had to say goodbye to my good friend Joe. When we got him, he was a three-year-old rescue who came with some issues, but also with a massive heart that wanted nothing more than to please. Over the past seven years, I ran him in rally and agility, and he even got a title. But Boxers tend to age more quickly than other breeds, and he had taken a really bad turn in the last week of his life. There’s always going to be a Joe-shaped hole in my life going forward.
My wife made this video for him.
Goodbye Joe. I love you.
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July 25, 2019
Vandalizing the Marketplace of Ideas
Everyone who’s been paying attention and has mere than a passing affection for freedom of speech knows that Internet culture is getting out of hand. Especially at times, it seems, in the little corner of the net inhabited by Science Fiction fans. (Perennial case being YA Twitter, of which I’ve expounded on elsewhere.)
However, something else is happening that’s a little more concerning than the Mean-Girls pile-ons that happen on social media and the blogs out there. There seems to be an increasing effort to use the functionality of the social media sites themselves to try and hurt or diminish one’s ideological enemies. This is long been the case on Facebook, where there’s a cottage industry in maliciously using Facebook’s “Report Post” functionality to get posts taken down and users suspended for dubious reasons. The trend has spread to Wikipedia. A growing number of authors (who at this writing include Michael Z. Williamson, Sarah Hoyt, Tom Kratman & Brad Torgersen) have recently had their pages flagged for deletion due to non-notability.
While Wikipedia has some arcane rationales for notability, I’m with John Scalzi in saying there’s no question these authors are notable. (If they aren’t, about 90% of the mid-list SF authors on Wikipedia need to go.) More importantly, it’s clear just from who’s being targeted, all sharing a publisher and all having some link to l’affaire Puppies, that these deletion flags are both malicious and politically motivated. That’s troubling in a time when we have a bunch of tech companies all putting their thumbs on the scale in some way or other.
Free speech is a prerequisite of civil society. It doesn’t matter if it’s lost through legislation, an algorithm, corporate policy, or by someone gaming a system, once it’s lost, trust in all remaining discourse is diminished until all that’s left can be dismissed as banal or propaganda. In a sense, these Wikipedia edits are a mini version of Google trying to game the next election, or Facebook deciding that a post complaining about them deleting a post is “hate speech”.
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July 18, 2019
Hacked
Well last night I found out I had been hacked. Some anal abscess of a semi-human decided to inject a phishing page on my domain. A nice person (Canadian, natch) e-mailed me to tell me. He actually looked at my domain and decided that it didn’t seem the home of some Russian troglodyte, so figured I’d been hacked. I was able to go to my host and excise the phishing page, as well as at least some code that was allowing them to inject files into my WordPress install. The good news is that Google is no longer flagging my site as malware. And thanks to all the people who reported back my site as legit, you probably speeded that process up.
Unfortunately, as far as technical help goes, my web host was only interested in upselling me on security packages that cost three times my hosting cost. (or more) I may be moving web hosts. I’m also probably going to rebuild my site in the near future as I no longer quite trust this install. *glares at WordPress*
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June 22, 2019
Libertycon
I’ll be at Libertycon this upcoming weekend. For those of you attending, here is my schedule:
Fri 06:00PM : Autograph Session – Dealer’s Room
Sat 02:00PM : Essential Elements of High Fantasy – CC: Meeting Rooms 9 & 10
Sat 04:00PM : World Building Across the Genres – CC: Meeting Room 8
Sat 05:00PM : Author’s Alley – M: Plaza Ballroom Mezzanine
Sun 10:00AM : Reading – CC: Meeting Room 7
Sun 02:00PM : Humor in SF and Fantasy – CC: Meeting Room 7
Hope to see you there.
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May 22, 2019
A Scribe’s Journey
…that’s the podcast I’m appearing on today, where I talk about my latest novel, Marked. It will be on YouTube at noon eastern. If you prefer audio-only podcasts it’ll be on IHeartRadio. It will also be available through iTunes.
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May 19, 2019
Watch This Space.
Just finished an interview about Marked for Richard Paolinelli’s podcast, “a Scribe’s Journey,” and should be up Wednesday. Links to follow when I get them.
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March 11, 2019
YA Twitter is a Dumpster Fire
I’ve published a longish gest blog over at Sara Hoyt’s page. It’s about the pathological targeting of young debut authors in the Twitterverse. Please go check it out.
By now you probably all know the story of Amélie Wen Zhao and her book Blood Heir. She was a new rising star in YA publishing, about to debut a three-book trilogy with Delacorte to the tune of something like $500,000. She was justifiably stoked to land such a deal. And, aside from the money, she had the excitement that every single professional author can identify with; her first book was going to see print. I think any novelist will tell you, there is precious little that compares with that feeling. Her own words on Twitter: “I am THRILLED to announce that I AM GOING TO BE PUBLISHED.” Most fellow writers can recognize and feel her excitement with just that sentence. She expressed that excitement on her own site:
“I don’t think it’s sunk in until this very moment, when I sat down to write this post — that I am going to be a published author. I AM GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR!!!!!!”
Then came the toxic fandom.
If you’d like to read something that hasn’t been subject to a Twitter pile-on, you might like S Andrew Swann’s latest book Marked, which Publisher’s Weekly called, “bizarre, dark, and occasionally wild…”
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February 24, 2019
Surf like it’s 1990
The world-wide-web is about to turn thirty. If you, like me, began experiencing the Internet in the dark age of Usenet and 1200 baud dialup, the folks at CERN have set up something a little more way-back than the Wayback machine at the Internet Archive. Yes, before rainbow gradients and animated GIFs, before Internet Explorer, before Netscape, there was the original NeXT browser. And you can see it emulated here if you want to see how the web began.
If you like more literal time-travel, as well as zombies, airships and Dodge Chargers, you might like S Andrew Swann’s latest book Marked, which Publisher’s Weekly called, “bizarre, dark, and occasionally wild…”
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February 19, 2019
Outsourcing Your Stupidity
It has been a while since I’ve done a rant about plagiarism. It’s one of the more corrosive bits of self-destruction writers engage in. It might be envy, or laziness or something deep-seated and broken in the writer’s psyche, but in most cases I’ve heard of, the plagiarist is compulsive to the point that they’ll inevitably be found out. After all, by its very nature, this is a sin that’s intended to be flaunted in front of as many people as possible.
But someone’s found a new wrinkle on this rotten old fruit.
The victim in this case is romance author Courtney Milan. In her own words:
If you know me, you know I do not make accusations lightly–especially accusations about plagiarism and copyright infringement. Earlier today, a fan sent me an email claiming that portions of my book that had been copied by another author. After investigation, I have concluded that Christiane Serruya has copied, word-for-word, multiple passages from my book The Duchess War.
Somehow the plagiarist never takes that one fan into account. As if nobody out there is going to recognize the material they stole from a N.Y. Times bestselling author. Not like there are thousands of fans out there reading books in the same genre, right?
We’ll skip the damning list of evidence Courtney supplies. Suffice to say, evidence in these cases is always damning. When you have copied passages word-for-word from prior work, what’s your defense? “Oops, my bad?”
Well, Christiane Serruya has a novel defense for her plagiarism. Something original that I admittedly never heard before:
This falls into serious WTF territory. That ghostwriter was a piece of work:
And while passages from Bella Andre, Trish Morey, Lynne Graham, Abby Green, Karen Marie Moning, Lisa Kleypas, Kresley Cole (is your jaw on the floor with mine?) and many others have been identified, reader Kawy also spotted lifted recipes from The Knot, and from The Field Magazine…
Like I said, compulsive. It was probably just as much work constructing this Frankenstein book as it would have been to write an actual novel.
So let this be a lesson, don’t buy cheap romance manuscripts from Chinese Bots on the Internet.
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