Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 16

This End Not An End Point

It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away.

A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch.

We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes are still forthcoming, nine years after the last release. Adaptations of the series have reached their conclusion, before the source material.

Martin’s readers hit the ragged edge and found themselves waiting, hoping, struggling. Sitting with a prolonged ellipsis, looking towards an uncertain future with no idea when the story may resume.

The ragged edge Martin leaves at the end of each novel is not so different from the cliff-hanger at the end of a comic book. It’s a waypoint on the character’s journey, not a definitive ending. Satisfying without being filling, enough to keep you satisfied until the next instalment lands. Even trade paperbacks, bringing together six or eight issues of an arc, typically end on a moment that’s pivotal without becoming a final climax.

If the ragged edge is part of the pleasure, what makes Martin’s readers so unsatisfied?

Part of the issue is definitely temporal: mediums that rely on long-term seriality have typically foregrounded when and where you can find out what happens next. Pick up the next issue in thirty day. Tune in for the next episode, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel. The uncertainty of the ragged edge is mitigated by the firm knowledge of when it will be resolved, allowing the focus to shift to how and the pleasures of speculation.

Disruptions to those norms have typically erred on giving the readers control: binge watch this whole season of TV in boxed, or stream it on on day one; subscribe to get each issue as it comes out, or buy the trades to read whole arcs at once.

Books have rarely had that kind of trade-off, and Martin’s schedule is plagued by a lack of trust. Eleven years after the last release, with no firm date for the final volumes, even the hint that a new book is coming is met with a kind of ongoing distrust. We’ve been burned before, the fans mutter. Just tell us when it’s actually out.  

The other difference is structural. Martin’s series progresses towards an end-point, concludes once the Game of Thrones is played and the new kind is finally crowned. Meanwhile, Superman’s story has been ongoing since his debut 1938. Comic books will iterate on and on, leaving the current story arc behind. We’ll keep writing so long as you keep buying, and there’s value in putting out issues.

The default promise of the comic book serial is this end not an endpoint. There is always another issue. Another take on the character, another adventure to be resolved. Every happy ending is temporary. Every resolution can be undone in the name of another story down the line.

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch, but his series is framed as one big story told in seperate parts. The ragged edge feels like a broken promise, a void that leaves the tale unfinished.

And that’s compounded by the product you buy: each instalment a big, doorstopper novel that has weight and heft. A book just like any other, with the attendant promise that it will contain a whole story and a point of narrative climax.

The physical object signals intent, even if the contents diverge from the promise.

Status: 29 April 2020

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia.

THE QUICK-AND-DIRTY UPDATES

Just finished up ten straight days of marking assignments, and I’m rebuilding my writing routines. Pivoting into a month of fairly intense deadlines—I’ll be slow to respond to emails, comments, and messages.My brain is full of pirates, comics, and space mercenaries.If you read 11 years of Warren Ellis blog posts in the space of ten days it’ll do weird things to your brain.  

CURRENT INBOX: 14 (plus 4 outstanding emails I still really need to send)

WORKING ON

Editing Crusade (Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller #3)Finalising contracts that crashed into marking deadlinesWriting a sci-fi novella for my thesis, Disposable Bodies.Drafting a short story in the Black Magic, Black Sails universeThinking out loud with an ongoing series of blog posts about comic books and fiction publishing.Uploading the Brain Jar backlist to the BundleRabbit system and Google Books

THINKING ABOUT

Rebuilding daily routines and bringing my focus on short-term writing goals.A freelance cover design and layout project I’ll be meeting folks about on Friday.Pro-wresting narratives and how they achieve certain effects

PROJECTS ON HAITUS

A supplementary Keith Murphy series about life on the Gold Coast while awaiting Ragnarok (too close to the current age)

READING

TREASURE ISLAND , Robert Louis Stevenson MASTER & COMMANDER , Patrick O’Brien THE LAST WISH , Andrzej Sapkowski

LISTENING TO

Hot Knife , Fiona Apple

WATCHING

AEW Dynamite episodes 14-19

CHANCE THAT I WILL DEPLOY ORBITAL LASERS TO DESTROY YOU ALL IN THE COMING WEEK?

16.01%

STATUS OF THE ADMIRAL

The Logic Behind Pulling Apart My Assumptions

On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model.

Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave for months after the pandemic is over. It’s also touched with a longstanding, negative around agents and traditional publishing practices that runs through Rusch’s non-fiction work. Not necessarily a reason to avoid reading it, but something to be aware of before you go in and maybe treat this is as a useful data point rather than a gospel advice for what to do next.

I don’t know that I see quite the level of gloom that Rusch does for traditional publishing, but I do see an awful lot of bad coming down the pipe. More importantly, I see a space where lots of business assumptions will end up being questioned and new stuff will be tried.

Which is half the reason I find myself writing things like the scratchpad series about publishing and comics, trying to pull apart my own assumptions about publishing, and figure out opportunities that are being overlooked.

No Ellipsis Publishing

There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence.

Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed.

As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or produced in leather-bound omnibus editions. Serialised narratives transformed into books, narratives with recognizable beginnings and middles and ends, even as there’s a new arc underway in the latest issue.

Books that can sit in bookstores, rather than being sold into a specialty market serviced by comic shops.

Single issues of a comic book haven’t been cheap in a long time, and they’re rarely produced on cheap paper. Digital colouring achieved more than the four-colour press ever could, allowing for nuances in art and design that hadn’t been there fifty years ago. Paper quality improved. No longer mass-market format, but a boutique product advertised at a dedicated readership willing to seek out sales venues and pay a premium to see the story unfold issue by issue.

It’s a model that makes little sense to a casual reader. Friends who still read their favourite series in singles, here in 2020 Australia, report prices of seven or eight dollars an issue for the comics they follow. Many of them continue to buy multiple comics per week, making regular trips to the friendly local comic shop to pick up this week’s releases. Then the books are read, bagged, and stored. Added to the collection. The next issue is always coming, advancing the story another 32 pages.

Nobody does this because it’s a cheap and disposable form of narrative, here in the early days of the twenty-first century. Trades tend to arrive hot on the heels of the single issues. A six-issue arc may be collected two or three months after the sixth issue is released, and the price-point will likely be more agreeable.

Folks collect single issue of comics because there’s still a pleasure in the form, in grabbing a bite-sized chunk of story that’s easily portable and quick to read. Not every issue promises an immediate resolution, but those that don’t promise thirty days caught in the ellipsis between one issue and the next, creating a breathing space to ponder what might happen that few other mediums enforce in the same way.

They collect singles and have the first conversations about a story, rather than coming to it after the story is over. They see the value in being in a position to lead the conversations, rather than coming in after the rush of the new has passed. They may not be the only readers of this story, but they will always be the first wave, the folks engaging with the story (and the creators) as it was being written.

And they collect singles because it speaks to an identity as much as a love of the form, and because there’s value in going to the comic shop and encountering one’s tribe. And once that group of readers have been satisfied, comic books iterate out. They scoop up the readers who prefer to grab things in trade, having drifted away from single issues over the years. Or they grab the readers who would never step foot in comic shop, and only buy comics in collections with triple-figure page counts and spines thick enough to print the title on.

I don’t want to argue that folks who read trades are not comic readers, although I acknowledge that many of the issues with the comics community become predicated on the way markers of identity have been valued.

What’s interesting to me is the implications of the model: a story that represents different reading experiences as it moves through its iterative release cycle. The incomplete reading experience of the single issue, and the devotion it asks of a reader. The long pauses where the possibilities of a story live in the reader’s head, all the potentials playing out in the space between releases.  

To read a single comic book is to embrace the incomplete narrative, and welcome the knowledge there is more to come.

Fiction books haven’t welcomed the incomplete for the bulk of my lifetime. There’s no physical object, like the single issue, that signals the author’s intent to tell the story in part. Instead, the iterative publishing cycle focuses on formats: Hardcover; Trade Paperback; Mass Market Paperback; Ebook.

The story contained within remains fundamentally the same. The distinctions are one of cost prestige, not reading experience. Books—regardless of format—signal their contents as complete. Ill-suited to narrative iteration.

And our stories shape themselves to that assumption, embrace conventions designed to bring about the satisfying conclusion within a page counts that publishers deem marketable. A no-pause-necessary model for narrative, where the long ellipsis after the last page is discouraged: Thou wilt not cliffhanger, prose author. Thou shalt write like the wind, if your series is unfinished, so that the ellipsis does linger with us too long.

And how dare you do anything but write the next book, once the rough edge of a story has been left and the reader’s wait begins.

Shivering Sands, Warren Ellis, and The Long Tail

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition.

Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions.

As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.”

I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt.

Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks.

And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote the book back then, and he sure as shit isn’t promoting it now, but I found myself dredging up old blog posts on his former blog and realised that it existed.

Since I’d been on a bit of a Warren Ellis kick, and a lot of what I was reading from his 2009 ramble fed into my current interests, I swung $20 on getting a copy printed and fired in my direction.

Fuck knows if I’ll ever get it, given the state of the world at the moment, but I’ve made the attempt. Eleven years on, this weird little book of Warren Ellis reprints is earning him a little cash and me a whole lot of joy.

And eleven years later, I’m talking about the book. Sending fresh eyes in its direction. Letting folks know my appreciation for Ellis work, and why I’m excited for this book in particular.

If he and his collaborators had updated it to release in an actual ebook format, and published through the more contemporary POD services that feed into distribution, I suspect it could be earning more than it does.

I also suspect that Ellis is content to have the book lying fallow, occasionally purchased by fans like me who track its existence down.

“Sure,” you say, “but Warren Ellis is a massively popular comics writer, turned massively popular script writer, and was a bit of an internet celebrity back in 2009.”

Sure.

But here’s the thing: I wrote and published RPG gaming books from 2005 to 2007. I wasn’t particularly well known, and have largely disappeared from the scene after I gave up publishing. The edition of D&D my books supported was at least two editions back, and the same is true of the small handful of other games I wrote content for after they opened up their games to third-party publishers.

Like Ellis, I let the old releases go fallow. They don’t get updated or transferred to new formats. I don’t try and find new sales channels. It’s been thirteen years since I did anything more than look at the sales figures, and there are still the occasional weeks where I earn more from a dozen D&D spells I wrote in 2006 than I do from fiction.

And that’s what the long tail is: picking up a little bit of cash from things you wrote a decade ago. Which, notably, was still in the era when digital publishing and ebooks still felt shiny and new, and POD was still a weird-as-heck struggle to get stuff uploaded.

It’s better now. Cleaner and more efficient and feeding into the same places you buy all your other books. It won’t stay that way forever–ebooks will be disrupted, as will POD, but the formats will still have it’s fans and there’s always the option of updating and repurposing.

And writers who have come of age with the internet produce an awful lot of content they can update and re-purpose, if they’re willing to embrace the skills they need to do it fast-and-cheap.

Poetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over.

I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there.

Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was consumed. Alan Moore put forth a theory he learned from an editor: comic book characters are limited to twenty-five words of dialogue, with 35 words maximum in an a panel. Anything more, and the words take up too much of the panel, giving too little space to the art.

The conventions of comic book storytelling were built around the physical object, the production tools used to create it, and the economies of scale in the marketplace.

This is true for fiction, although it tends to be a little less obvious. Prose doesn’t fit on the page in the same way, flows across the page and continues on with nary a pause.

Tell an editor that you want to focus on a dramatic reveal at the bottom of page thirty-three, and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts. That’s not the way books work.

Tell an editor that you’ve written a 200,000 word novel as your debut, and they’ll give you that same pained look. Also not the way books work, 99% of the time. Costs too much to produce, intimidates the fuck out of an audience. Easier by far to sell two 100,000 word novels, which is how that becomes the default length for fiction in the vast majority of genres.

The fiction industry has conventions based upon marketing and production concerns, just the same as comics, but it’s easier to ignore the impact they have on poetic process because the page is invisible in the narrative process for prose fiction.

Instead, it turns into conventional wisdom around word-count: if your story goes over 6,000 words, it’ll be a bugbear to find a market that’ll take it; avoid novellas, because there’s no audience for ’em; work towards a 100k novel, because that’s the easiest sell if you’re starting out.

When I first started talking about using comic book models to structure a prose publishing company, everyone naturally leapt to the idea of using serial fiction instalments. Which is definitely on my radar, but not the real kernel that makes the idea interesting to me.

What appeals to me is thinking about the physical object of a thirty-two page booklet and filling it in an interesting way. Paying attention to the way the finished product impacts the conventions of telling a story, and what happens when the job ceases to be “write a narrative,” and becomes “fill 32 pages.”

Mornings

Interesting thing about putting a Now Page on the internet: you’ll put up things that are very much a work-in-progress line of half-baked thinking up there, and people in other timezones will will prod you for more information before you’ve had your morning coffee.

At which point you will need an extra three shots of caffeine just to cope with the idea that you need to be human and articulate.

Which also means I could be doing a long, thinking-in-progress series of posts about the “Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models” entry, trying to pin down exactly what I’m thinking beyond “reading too many Warren Ellis rants about the state of publishing.”

Please send coffee. No, more than that.

Adding a Now Page

Earlier this week I launched a Now Page, based on an idea put forward by Derek Sivers about including pages about what you’re focused on right now alongside the customary About and Contact pages.

Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.

Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

from about NowNowNow.com

I first came across the idea on Warren Ellis’ blog, where he plumbed the flaws of the concept; namely, if you want it to be effective, people need to go and update their Now page on he regular and that’s not an instinctive habit.

Mine is largely reposting content from the blog. This works better for me because I spend more time thinking about blog content than I do overall site structure. I’m more likely to look at an empty day in the schedule and post an update than I am head over to a static page and update it (as are most authors, to be honest; just look at the sheer number of out-of-date bios and book pages on author sites around the internet).

Short version, every time I post an update with the Status tag here, the site will automatically display the latest copy on www.PeterMBall.com/now along with a date-stamp.

Folks who follow the blog regularly will get updates about where my focus is–a net win given that I’m starting to work with folks outside my household–while other folks who want to check on the status of things can click over to the static Now page and get a quick precis of where my head’s at.

Tiny Moments of Terror and Telling Stories

I posted this to Facebook on Sunday, when I was still twitchy as fuck about everything that happened. Now I’m revisiting it, 48 hours later, because this shit has derailed things pretty badly on the writing front, given the way it spiked my anxiety..

The story begins like this: our local pharmacy was out of the medication my partner uses to ease their chronic arthritis pain. For our household, this qualifies as a very bad thing, so we made plans for me to try the pharmacy at the local shopping centre when I did the weekly shopping.

That pharmacy has been locked down, with signs on the doors alerting everyone there was an active COVID patient on the premises over the last few days. I start doing the math, figure trying a third pharmacy is a better choice than doing shopping. So I hit Google, search for other small pharmacy outlets in my local area, and hie over to a hole-in-the-wall place about ten minutes away.

It’s not exactly a place doing a lot of business at 3:30 PM on an Easter Sunday. The woman behind the prescription counter is one of those cheerful customer service types who asks how your day is going and chats as they take your order, which is a surprisingly comforting trait in a world where you don’t leave the house more than once a week.

I put in my partners script, and the pharmacy is well stocked. Their chemists go to work, and I loiter out of the way so that any new customers have a clean path along the spatial distancing markers when they come in.

Then the fuckhead appears. Young bloke. Late twenties or early thirties. Not looking well.

This sniffly, coughing motherfucker walks in without giving the spatial distancing markers a second glance. Woman on the counter asks how his weekends going, and he tells us his tale: he’s got bronchitis, but the hospital put him in a COVID ward.

“Oh no,” the woman on the counter says. “Good that your tests cleared okay, though.”

“Didn’t wait,” this asshole says. “They weren’t treating us like adults, and I’m a grown man, so I discharged myself. Going to head home and eat my mum’s cooking while I recover.”

Woman at the counter stares at him in semi-professional horror. I am far less discreet as I back the fuck away to get as much distance as possible between us. My brain is a riot of questions, the firs six or seven layers of which are panicked variations of what the actual fuck? Which is followed by how the actual fuck do you discharge yourself from a COVID ward?

Meanwhile, this stupid motherfucker stands in the middle of the store, trying to tell us the hospital is a hellhole and a man shouldn’t have to put up with that. All the ways in which he is personally aggrieved and affronted by the way he’s treated by hospital staff in the middle of, you know, a fucking pandemic.

They call my name, so I collect the medication and bail the fuck out. He’s coughing into his hand as I leave, positioning himself in the walkway between doorway and counter. It’s easy enough for me to go around him, skirting the fringes of the store, but nobody coming in has the background.

I feel sorry for the woman on the counter, and even sorrier for this asshole’s mum.

I keep wanting to tell this story to people, even now that I’m calmer than I was, because it was basically two minutes of horror. A short window where the permeability of the steps we take is laid bare–my partner and I have careful as heck about spatial distancing and exposure, and started a week or so ahead of the guidelines for such.

Those precautions are so easily undone, all because this asshole with a head full of toxic masculinity was affronted by the way hospital staff dealt with him.

Sure, the odds of infection are significantly slimmer than it seems on the surface: COVID is more reliant on an hour’s exposure than a few minutes, and it’s more likely this guy was in an observation ward than an actual COVID-specific treatment if he hadn’t been positively tested.

Still, it’s a wake-up call. I’m living on our couch for the next week or so while my partner takes the bedroom. A precaution, because the odds may be crazy slim, but neither my partner nor I are eager to take chances.

Right now, the urge to retell the story is all about regaining some small measure of the control I lost.

That’s the nice thing about writing. Every experience gets transmuted, somewhere along the line, transforming from a moment of hideous panic into a more reasoned and reflective understanding of the moment.

Status: Apr 14 2020

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia.

RIGHT NOW I’M FEELING

Pent up and restless, generating ideas faster than my writing process can keep up. About 55% of optimal.Satisfied that I’ve had more good writing days than bad over the last week.

CURRENT INBOX: 11 (plus 3 outstanding emails I need to send)

WORKING ON

Hacking together a Now page system I can actually maintain.Writing a Black Sails, Black Magic noveletteDrafting a serial about bunny head gunmen to run on the blog through the Pandemic lockdown.Editing Crusade (Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller #3)Recruiting established writers for a line of non-fiction chapbooks about writingEstablishing online homes for Brian Jar Press as an entity seperate to Peter M. BallMultiple sets of contracts that need to be finalised.Developing a new mindset around blogging and online engagement, designed to recapture some of the shit that’s gone missing since social media became the dominant appraoch.

THINKING ABOUT

Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models.A vignette-based writing project that might go on social media.A future series about a post-Atomic Age city, after all the science heroes like Doc Savage have crested and rusted away.How to pull apart the tools of self-publishing to utilise it in more interesting ways.How to plug terrifying holes in my budgets as a result of Covid-19.

ON HAITUS

Disposable Bodies, a novella being drafted for my thesis (resuming work on May 1)A supplementary Keith Murphy series about life on the Gold Coast while awaiting Ragnarok (too close to the current age)

READING

THE MAN OF BRONZE: DOC SAVAGE , Kenneth Hobeson DOC CHAOS: THE CHERNOBYL EFFECT , David Thorpe MASTER & COMMANDER , Patrick O’Brien

LISTENING TO

FLIGHT PATHS , The Paradise Motel

WATCHING

DEATH NOTE (2006)

CHANCE THAT I WILL DEPLOY ORBITAL LASERS TO DESTROY YOU ALL IN THE COMING WEEK?

34.45%

STATUS OF THE ADMIRAL