Tom Simon's Blog, page 9

The End of the World

To prepare you all for the end of the Mayan Long Count, and the inevitable universal apocalypse thereof, here is a hyper-accurate simulation of the event, as prepared in 1962 by Beyond the Fringe:



‘We must get a winner one day!’

The End of Earth and Sky: ‘In review’ at Amazon

I have just finished uploading The End of Earth and Sky to Amazon. The book is now listed as ‘in review’ and should be available for sale shortly.

As an experiment, I am enrolling this book in the KDP Select program for the next 90 days. For that time, it will be available on Amazon exclusively. Lord Talon’s Revenge (and Writing Down the Dragon, when it appears) will continue to be available from the whole range of ebook retailers. After the 90 days are up, I intend to make The End of Earth and Sky available from other retailers. My publisher’s agreement with Apple iBooks, in particular, requires me to make all my books available through the iBook Store, except for special, limited-time promotions.

Watch this space for further announcements.

EDIT: Now advanced from ‘In Review’ to ‘Publishing’. Should reach ‘Live’ within 12 hours, unless I roll snake eyes and land on ‘Go To Jail’.

Also, my Author Central page is now live. It will presumably get more interesting once I have more books to add.

The problem of cover copy

I am having difficulty with the cover/catalogue copy for The End of Earth and Sky, which is basically the last thing that needs doing before I can shove it out the door. The obvious thing, of course, would be to do this:

This is a RECORD COVER. This writing is the DESIGN upon the record cover. The DESIGN is to help SELL the record. We hope to draw your attention to it and encourage you to pick it up. When you have done that maybe you’ll be persuaded to listen to the music — in this case XTC’s Go 2 album. Then we want you to BUY it. The idea being that the more of you that buy this record the more money Virgin Records, the manager Ian Reid and XTC themselves will make. To the aforementioned this is known as PLEASURE. A good cover DESIGN is one that attracts more buyers and gives more pleasure. This writing is trying to pull you in much like an eye-catching picture. It is designed to get you to READ IT. This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM. But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW! because all we are attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you’ll be doing what we tell you, and if you read on you’ll be doing what we’ve wanted all along. And the more you read on the more you’re falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good commercial design works. They’re TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it’s describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you’ve read this far then you’re TRICKED but you wouldn’t have known this unless you’d read this far. At least we’re telling you directly instead of seducing you with a beautiful or haunting visual that may never tell you. We’re letting you know that you ought to buy this record because in essence it’s a PRODUCT and PRODUCTS are to be consumed and you are a consumer and this is a good PRODUCT. We could have written the band’s name in special lettering so that it stood out and you’d see it before you’d read any of this writing and possibly have bought it anyway. What we are really suggesting is that you are FOOLISH to buy or not buy an album merely as a consequence of the design on its cover. This is a con because if you agree then you’ll probably like this writing — which is the cover design — and hence the album inside. But we’ve just warned you against that. The con is a con. A good cover design could be considered as one that gets you to buy the record, but that never actually happens to YOU because YOU know it’s just a design for the cover. And this is the RECORD COVER.

So that would be the obvious thing to do, except that it’s already been done, so I shall have to come up with something else. (I do wish I could use the sentence ‘The con is a con’, though, because that is one of my favourite verbal pretzels of all time.) I will have to come up with some other COPY to lure people to BUY my PRODUCT, so that I can put it on the BOOK COVER.

The Next Big Thing

jonathanmoeller has tagged me for The Next Big Thing. I am nearly as susceptible as a dragon to flattery (although, unlike Smaug, I am painfully aware of the weak points in my armour); what is more important, I am stuck on the all-important cover copy for the Octopus, so I can answer these questions as a sort of rehearsal.

The strict instructions call for me to tag five more writers, but Jonathan has sneakily tagged most of the people that it would occur to me to tag. Instead I shall ask the great-hearted and talented Sherwood Smith, who fights against the Deplorable Word under the name of sartorias , if she has a work in progress that she would like to put through the procedure. Sherwood is generally too reticent about her own work, and could stand to be less self-effacing about it. (I humbly beg your pardon, Sherwood, if you’ve already participated in this Next Big Thing thing, but if you have, I missed it.)

Now that I’ve broken the rules all to smash, let us get on with the battered residue and answer the questions.
What is the working title of your book?

I always make up sardonic working titles that imply that my work in progress is rubbish, just to discourage me from talking about it excessively instead of writing it. I got this idea from a story that went the rounds on the Internet grapevine some time ago.

There was this tech company, it seems, whose engineers were sick and tired of having all their projects announced prematurely by the over-zealous sales force under their code names, generating hype (and impatience) that the actual technology could not live up to. So they struck back, and gave their new project the code name BARF. The sales force could not bring themselves to blab to the customers about a project named BARF, so the engineers were able to work in peace.

In this spirit, my first completed project ( Lord Talon’s Revenge ), which was published this past August, went by the working title of ‘The Filthy Screed’. Writing Down the Dragon, my book of essays on what I call the Tolkien Method, is proceeding under the incognito of ‘The Scratch Monkey’. But the work I want to talk about here, which my 3.6 Loyal Readers know all too well, is ‘The Magnificent Octopus’.

‘The Magnificent Octopus’ is a multi-volume series. The actual series title is The Eye of the Maker. Book One, which with luck will be appearing very shortly, is to be called The End of Earth and Sky.


Where did the idea for the book come from?

There is a large park in Calgary near the neighbourhood where I grew up: Fish Creek Provincial Park. One day over thirty years ago, I rode my bicycle down one of the paths into the valley where the park is; but I took the wrong entrance by mistake, and wound up slogging through what seemed like miles of up-hill, down-dale, get-off-your-bike-and-push terrain before I struck any familiar landmarks. If this sounds like an inauspicious idea for a fantasy, it probably is. But it gave me the idea of the hero returning from the forbidden and forbidding mountain realm of the Old Gods, coming back by a different road than he thought he was taking, and being catapulted into all sorts of adventures because he didn’t know where he was.

It is Brian Aldiss, I think, who says that his best stories come from the juxtaposition of two ideas, which he calls the exotic and the familiar. For me, getting lost in the park was the familiar bit. The exotic idea (which is now too familiar to anybody who uses the Internet) was the idea of the Eye of the Maker itself, the magic jewel that confers (theoretical) omniscience: it answers, correctly and infallibly (unlike the Internet), any question that you have the wit to ask it. But it can’t predict the future, and it doesn’t tell you the things that you don’t know you don’t know.

What genre does this fall under?

Straight-up epic fantasy of, I am afraid, a very old-fashioned kind. It isn’t particularly gritty or ironic or ‘Grimdark’, and it certainly isn’t urban fantasy; it hasn’t got a wizards’ school or sparkly vampires, and it should therefore, according to the commercial pundits, go over like pickled strawberries.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie version?

I go by voices more than faces when I think of actors; sometimes I borrow an actor’s voice, and try to imagine a particular character’s dialogue being delivered in that voice. I also like to read my work aloud (privately) as a way of catching infelicities and errors. In my mind’s ear I have borrowed Christopher Lee’s voice for Vargon, Lord of the Dead. Rijeth, the retired wizard, sounds something like the long-late William Hartnell. The other characters haven’t yet attached themselves to particular voices.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of the book?

Oh, gosh. I hate writing these—

Young Calin Lowford, forbidden to go to war, braves the forbidden mountains of the Old Gods to avenge his best friend’s death.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published (under the name of Bondwine Books). ‘Bondwine’ is the name of a magic elixir that appears later on in the series.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Two months, but that was decades ago and almost nothing of that draft has survived. Once a decade or so, I have dusted it off and tried again, more or less from scratch, to see if I have grown sufficiently as a writer to do the subject justice. This time I think I may have done it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

After so many years of drafts and side-story and back-story, it has developed some of the many-layered and ramifying nature of Tolkien’s work. I also have some of Tolkien’s habit of developing the story through language (or vice versa), though of course I am immensely less learned. The story as such owes something to Stephen R. Donaldson, though without, I hope, the brooding self-pity that tends to disfigure his heroes. There are threads of Welsh and English legend, and a certain flavour of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books. Prydain is of course just the old Welsh name for Britain; it was partly as a nod to Alexander, partly to emphasize the British elements in my invented country, and partly for reasons to do with my invented language, that I called that country ‘Pyrandain’.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

In the first instance, I was a teenaged fanboy with Tolkien, Donaldson, Lewis, and Alexander (and others) swirling round all too freely in my head. I wanted to join in on the conversation, and pay forward some of the debt that I owed to the writers and the books I loved. Besides, it seemed like (and was) enormous fun to do. After the first attempt went nowhere helpful, I set the story aside, but something about it insisted on being told. I have tried my hand at a good many other things (some of which had nothing to do with writing), but I keep coming back to this. Evidently it needs to be written down properly and exorcised from my brain.

What else about your book might pique the interest of readers?

Chases, fights, oaths of revenge, ancient lore, wizardly combats, omens, visions, perils, betrayals, magical tests, hidden gods, and the Secret at the End of the World. And that’s just in Book One. Seven more to come!

Happy Beethoven’s Birthday!

Our dear Ludwig Van is 242 today, or would be but for a slight case of death. His music, however, lives on, and in some cases, grows stronger and clearer with the passing of the years.

This piece was almost universally condemned when it appeared in print just after Beethoven died, but came into its own in the last century. Stravinsky called it ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’. That may be an exaggeration, but it is a curiously timeless piece, looking back to the eighteenth century, to the great age of the fugue, and forward to the freewheeling chromatic experimentalism of the earlier twentieth. It shows Beethoven still breaking new musical ground, pushing beyond the expectations of his listeners and the conventions of his contemporaries, even in the last year of his life.

The video track is an animated MIDI representation of the score: red bars for 1st violin, yellow(ish) for 2nd violin, green for viola, blue for cello. (Animation by Stephen Malinowski.)

Here is Opus 133, the Große Fuge.



EDIT: A commenter on YouTube has this unusually insightful comment to offer on the Große Fuge:

Ça me fait comme observer les tripes d’un homme. Terrible et fascinant, impossible de détourner les yeux.

For those of you who don’t read French: ‘This makes me feel like I am looking at the guts of a man. Terrible and fascinating, impossible to look away.’

I agree: these are the guts of Beethoven, very close to the bone.

Quotha: C. S. Lewis on radical change

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,’ he said, ‘the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught — an inability to dis-believe advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. Their next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves — though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do. It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change.’
—C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress

Quotha: Cleese on creativity

It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking; and it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
—John Cleese

Cleese on creativity, 1991:



Bonus quote:

Solemnity, on the other hand — I don’t know what it’s for.

Cleese concludes with some (satirical) advice on how to prevent your subordinates from being creative, so they will never rock the boat or endanger your authority. It occurred to me while listening that part of the reason Big Publishing is in so much trouble is that it is largely run, at the senior executive level, by people who genuinely think this is a good idea.

In particular, he suggests keeping everyone frantically busy all the time, so they will have no time to think, or to get into the ‘open mode’ in which all creativity occurs. In this light it becomes clear that piling hugely excessive amounts of work onto an ever-diminishing number of employees, as big publishers have been doing for years, is a pitch-perfect way of stifling creativity in a business whose products depend on the creative process for their very existence.

There is the writer’s creativity, of course; but more than that, the services that publishers are so proud of offering to writers, and so poor at actually delivering, nearly all require creative thought to do well: structural editing, cover art and design, blurb-writing (a tremendously difficult creative art), and figuring out how to get the bookselling industry and the reading public to take interest in the obscure fact that the book actually exists. Too much of this work is done in an uncreative, perfunctory manner, which in many cases means it might as well not be done at all.

(Hat tip to The Passive Voice)

Happy 12/12/12 . . .

. . . and get it out of your system today, because (barring some obscenely huge breakthrough in gerontology) there won’t be another numeric triple like this during our lifetimes. (If you are very young, and live to be very old, you may live to see the next triple, 88 years and 20 days from now. Good luck to you and Godspeed.)

Now back to the real business of the day, which is thinking up other arbitrary but fun combinations of numbers so we don’t all die of calendrical ennui during the rest of this century.