Regina Glei's Blog, page 42

Loudpart 12 Report

Loudpark calls itself Japan’s biggest heavy metal festival and I guess that’s true with a capacity in the Saitama Super Arena of 30,000 people in the main hall and not to forget a huge foyer that fits another couple thousand people. The event had three stages, the “ultimate stage”, the “big rock stage” in the main, 30,000-people hall and the “extreme stage” in the foyer.

I arrived at about 9:40 in the morning and the gates had opened ten minutes before that. I checked out the goods queue and it was so ridiculously long that I gave up and headed straight for the big rock stage where at 11:15 one of my main reasons for going to Loudpark 12 would play, Norwegian prog metal band Circus Maximus. On the neighboring ultimate stage a guy names Christopher Amott was supposed to open the festival at 10:30. The big rock stage was already prepared for Circus and a few people had gathered at the front but I managed to sneak in and catch a spot in the front row to the left hand side of the stage.

The Amott act was a pretty lame festival opener in my opinion. His bassist was missing because he had lost his passport in the US mail (?) and maybe that threw him off line, but nevertheless it could have been more energetic and less “I don’t really want to play today” kind of performance – at least that was my opinion.

It was thus more or less up to Circus to open the festival and they very well accomplished that mission. It was their first time in Japan and you could feel that they were excited being here. The Japanese crowd is always super supportive and did not let Circus down either and Michael said that “we are amazing even before lunch” Circus played two of my favorite songs of theirs too, “I Am” and “Game of Life” and thus left me thoroughly satisfied with the gig.

On the Loudpark homepage had been an announcement that there would be autograph sessions with some of the bands and Circus among them. I have never been to an autograph session in my life and since I like doing new things that was a good opportunity and I had taken my “Nine” album with me. I should have taken the jacket only but had brought the whole CD, well, I’ll know better next time.

I had a bit of a hard time finding the autograph booth amongst the herds that still lined up for the goods but eventually found it. White-clad security people asked me whether I had brought a pamphlet when I wanted to line up, what pamphlet? I had brought a CD I wanted them to sign. It turned out that you were supposed to buy the Loudpark pamphlet and line up with it and let the band sign that. But myself and several people behind me had not heard of such regulations and since there were not too many of us the security guy let us through, which was kinda nice of him.

I chatted with some other people in line and we waited for the Circus. Only some 30 people waited in line and I was the only non-Japanese. This fact, of course, made me have to explain to each of the band members that I am German and live here for 12 years already. The bassist said to me that that’s awesome and that he’s only here for two days and wants to live here . I “revenged” the ‘how long do you live in Japan’ question by giving them all my “Dome Child” and “Siegfried” postcards – you never know what it’s good for

The entire band was beaming at the autograph session and again you could feel that they were very excited and happy to be here and be doing this. I asked them to come back to Japan soon and got a “hell yeah!” I’ll most certainly go to see the Circus if they come to Japan again!

With my nicely signed “Nine” album, I headed back into the hall for Dragonforce. I had missed Halestorm due to the autograph session, sorry for that. Before Dragonforce, a band called Hibria played, good sound, lots of jumping and bouncing. Right at the beginning of Dragonforce happened what I had feared to happen – mosh pit. Suddenly the crowd around me turned into a maelstrom, and sorry that’s just not my kind of thing. I fled from the arena, which was not easy and it took some two songs and a few bruises to get out of the maelstrom.

A bit unnerved by the run in with the maelstrom, I went for lunch and checked out the extreme stage where a death metal act called 1349 was playing. One of them was dressed as the reaper in a black cloak with hood. Man, that guy must lose ten liters of water per gig, respect. I next made my way to the goods and finally there was no more big queue and even a Circus Maximus “Nine” T-shirt left for me

I made my way through to the main hall again and watched the rest of Sebastian Bach and Buckcherry from a seat on the first stand, before heading down into the arena one last time for this day for Sonata Arctica. The Buckcherry guys surely win the contest for the most impressive tattoos of the festival, some amazing artwork on their bodies!

For Sonata I got pretty much to the front again but after the second song, major jumping and squeezing let me flee a bit to the back. Luckily, it was civilized enough to stay in the arena though and Sonata delivered a solid performance with great enthusiasm, especially on the singers behalf. He talked a lot in English between songs, thoroughly ignoring that most of the audience did not understand a word he was saying

That was enough arena for me for one day and after getting a drink, I retreated to the first stand again and watched the rest of In Flames from there and then the two major acts of the day: Helloween and slayer. One word to In Flames – amazing to see the maelstrom from above! The singer said something funny too, “the security guys in the front have nothing to do. They are waiting for you!” – encouraging the crowd to do crowd surfing. Some indeed managed, but the maelstrom was clearly the more preferred method of stress relief of the Japanese crowd

Helloween was pretty awesome German altrockers who still know how to heat up the crowd, they made us sing and me even headbang while being seated Very cool band with a great sound and the most impressive drum battery I have ever seen, one guy with four base drums! Holy lord. He was the only drummer in the festival who got a drum solo, and man, he deserved it. That is quite some machine he is handling there.

Slayer, then, of course, had the biggest and most impressive maelstroms to offer and I was very happy to be sitting save and sound on the first stand and watching the spectacle from above. Slayer made me wonder how four people can generate so much noise but it is not really my line of music. Therefore I decided to leave before the end in order to avoid having to line up for forever at the cloak and having major squeezing on the train home.

It was an awesome event with a line-up very much to my liking and depending on the line up, I’ll surely go again next year. Last but not least some, if amateurish photo impressions (taken with the iPhone 4 camera) – check out my Loudpark 12 photo set on Flickr.

Survival of the Fittest

There is always stuff happening while traveling. On my flight to Shanghai for yet another business trip it was like in the movies. Suddenly a flight attendant made an urgent announcement: is there a doctor or a nurse on board? If so, please contact the staff.

A few rows in front of me a man was apparently violently sick. They do not seem to have found a doctor or a nurse, though several people were hovering around the man. The head purser reseated the two other people in the guy’s row. Luckily the plane was only 95% full and there were a few seats left. They made the sick guy lie down in a three people row of the A321-200 we were flying. The man seemed to recover a bit during the flight and left the plane with us like everyone else but for a moment everyone was a bit shocked.

With tensions between Japan and China flying high it was a bit awkward on the plane. It might be my imagination, but there seemed a forced “let’s be business like and down to earth” atmosphere.

My looks of course do not reveal where I live, nevertheless it feels awkward. When I was in Shanghai the last time, a mere four months ago, there were no such concerns yet.

With some recently gathered Shanghai experience, I now know what to do when getting off the plane A year ago I fell victim to a much too high limousine service, in June I made the mistake to take the subway, which did not bring me to the hotel and I had to find some taxi at some train station to complete the journey. This time I knew I had to find a normal taxi and succeeded I waved my formerly printed out map to the hotel around and the taxi driver got it where he has to go. (little China travel advice: you really do need a map (in Chinese) or you need to be able to speak Chinese (Mandarin) otherwise you are lost and do need a limousine service where people speak English. None of the normal taxi drivers speaks a word of English).

So I sat there on the backseat of the taxi, looking for a safety belt. There was a belt but nothing to buckle it into … I ended up holding on to that seat belt completely uselessly of course while my driver slalomed at 150 kmh over the highway to Puxi at 18:00 local time, already in the dark and in evening rush hour.

This is one challenging adventure, the distance to the car behind you or in front of you is a few meters at 150 kmh. My driver knew where the police’s radar traps are and slowed down before each trap, though once he did not make it and was flashed and ended up cursing. Each and every driver is reckless and ruthless, this is very much survival of the fittest, nobody takes care of what is around him or her, time is money, the faster he brings me to the hotel, the sooner he can have another customer.

Promptly we got into a bit of a traffic jam and drove past an accident involving three cars. Rear-end collision accident. One car was half spun and blocked a lane, the one behind him and the one after that both had their noses squished. The cars owners stood in the middle of the street, each one of them on the phone. So apparently nobody got seriously hurt, or was even worried. They mostly looked angry and were shouting into their phones. After some more traffic jams downtown, I arrived safely at the hotel, sort of glad to be alive.

I rewarded myself then with a dinner buffet including a fun episode.

A Chinese waiter with perfect English (Marriott hotel) explained to me where what was and pointed out the dishes. “And over there we have special dishes, like goose, or ostrich or wild rabbit, for those who like such stuff, I wouldn’t eat it.” Big laugh, what a weird sales pitch, first of all he is Chinese and they are famous for eating “everything”, second, why does he sort of apologize for serving unusual dishes and tells me he wouldn’t eat it?

Just out of interest I had a tiny bit of wild rabbit. It tasted pretty much like whatever other meat and I could find nothing amazing or special about it.

Having actually a rather bad cold, I went to bed after the rabbit adventure.

In the morning a honking and hooting concert woke me up. My hotel room faced a crossroad and even through the window the amount of noise was just staggering.

I rode with a company bus from the hotel to the company, which picks up people from there every morning and the road adventure continued. Rough driving everywhere – who is strongest wins. Only some five percent of the many people on bikes and e-bikes drive with helmets. I don’t want to know how many people die every day on China’s streets.

On the way to the office, which is in a newly developed or developing business area, the bus passed some real slums. I would have liked to snap a picture but with Chinese colleagues on the bus and the Chinese driver in front that did not seem appropriate. In a field of literally rubble and buildings that are half collapsed and that looked 60 years old, laundry hung out to dry. I am pretty sure this area, encircled by a river, does not have running water and I doubt it has electricity. The half collapsed buildings look like they will be flattened soon by whatever new high rise construction program. I wonder where the people living there will go when that happens. Across from the river, modern high rises were already looming over the rubble area.

This was a short trip and it offered no room for sightseeing. On the first night, we had dinner at a place called the Shanghai Brewery with international food and an OK if not overwhelming Wiener Schnitzel. On the second night, we drove for an hour again through Shanghai traffic to a Chinese restaurant downtown Puxi relatively close to the Bund but not close enough for getting a look at it. The Chinese dinner was excellent with countless different little dishes whose names of course escape me.

On Friday it was already time to go back and for reasons unknown to me the last flight with Air China from Pudong to Narita leaving at 17:00 local time was canceled and I had to take the 14:00 flight and had to leave the work conference already at 11:30 to go through half the town back to Pudong. Since it was on a work day and in the middle of the day, traffic was relatively smooth, if busy and again slalom at high speeds on the highway.

The town seems to sprawl endlessly, some 20 million people live there after all. It looks much more conform than Tokyo despite the similar size. First of all Tokyo is mostly flat but not completely and second Tokyo has grown slower and is much more diverse. Flat Shanghai sprawls with high rise apartment blocks that look pretty much alike, while in Tokyo hardly one building resembles the next.

From afar I could see downtown and the new center tower which is supposed to reach 600 meters or so is yet only half as high as the “bottle opener” building whose official name I don’t know. Actually, I had expected it to grow faster within the past four months since I have been here last.

Arrived at the airport and after the whole check in procedure I found myself searching for the gate for the flight to Tokyo. Of course it might just be coincidence, but the Nartia flight left from the remotest gate of Pudong airport, downstairs tugged away from the pretty gates and we had to go to the plane via bus. In June I flew back to Japan via gangway. It might of course be an airport technical or airline technical matter that we were on the bus route, but it smacked a bit of those before mentioned tensions between Japan and China at the moment.

In a mere month, I will be back in China, next time to attend a seminar in Wuxi, which is 170 km west of Shanghai. I’m looking forward to that trip, since it will bring me into another city than Shanghai and also into one which is not on the usual tourist agenda. Let’s see what will happen during that trip

Quacking Horror

I have always been very sensitive to sound (that’s why I have such a selective musical taste – long live heavy metal ) and as of late noticed an interesting relationship between meaning and tone of voice. There is a Japanese – let me call it – food sales person tone. It sounds a bit like Donald Duck, a high, quacking style of voice. It seems that if you say the same thing the whole time it a) looses its meaning, and b) becomes a litany. This litany tone combined with the high quacking style makes it very hard to bear for my ears. There are these women at food stands in the food courts of a shopping malls that quack always “irasshaimaseeeeee” with a penetrating lingering on the “e” at the end.

“Irasshaimase” means “welcome (to my shop)” only shops and restaurants use the phrase. They don’t mean what they say, the language has been bereft of meaning. It’s just an automatism and as such it has changed from normal speech to quack language also in the tone of voice. I am sure all these ladies speaks differently at home (at least I hope so).

The worst case by far though, which makes it a weekly fight for me to go to that particular shop is a certain bakery. I go there every Friday after work to buy bread for my weekend brunches. The bread there is really good, but there is one object of torture in the shop, which makes me run in, grab my bread, run to the cashier’s desk and get out of there again as soon as possible. The torture instrument is astonishingly tall for a Japanese, close to 190 cm, and has also sumo wrestler qualities concerning body circumference, meaning he is quite fat. Nevertheless, he has the worst case of quacking litany I have ever encountered in Japan yet.

In a high-pitched, grave-penetrating quality, he shouts in astonishing volume without regress, “irasshaimase” and praises the freshness and quality of the bread in the shop and the latest delicacies. His job is, by the way, to refill the shelves with fresh produce. The tone, volume and style of his speech literally make my teeth hurt and set my nerves on edge. If I were to work in this shop at the cashier’s for example, I would either go mad after one day or, since I am more of an directing aggression outwards rather than inwards type, beat him up.

I cannot comprehend how anybody is able to work with this nightmare walking through the shop. I feel particularly sorry for the people working in the adjoining food stalls on the floor, since the bakery is in the food court of a department store. The staff of the Japanese sweets shop across the aisle are subject to the quacking horror the whole day as well.

Anyway, this combination of meaningless language having become litany in combination with a high-pitched tone is not unique to Mr. Quack and lets me philosophize about the way we communicate information. I wonder if the quacking horror works on anybody, on me it has certainly the opposite effect and I am currently looking for an alternative bakery in the new department store on the other side of the station… Why do we need all this noise in department stores in Japan? It’s far less noisy in the US for example. I’ve just been to a few department stores in Chicago.

There is certainly the Asian hustle and bustle but I think there is more. Simply judging from the noise level in Asian cities, I cannot get rid of the impression that Asians are more noise resistant than others. So, if you come to Asia, go to a department store and bathe in all the noise and try to identify some quacking. I’ll be on business trip to Shanghai again next week and hope to get the opportunity to visit a department store. I shall explicitly look for the Chinese version of quacking horror there

Rewriting Dark Matters

Three years ago my SF novella “Dark Matters” saw the light of day. The more time passed, the less I was happy with the current version of the story. My biggest concern was that I have learned a hell of a lot about writing the past three years (I think and hope) and I was itching to revise the manuscript.

During Chicon 7, I discussed things with the publisher of Dark Matters.

In its current form the piece has 29,000 words. The plan now is to beef it up to somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 words.

How do you do a thing like that? How do you add a “fourth third” to the story so to say? In my opinion, you can only do this by adding new material instead of doctoring around with the old.

The basic idea of the story is that the dark matter on the planet lets you see the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life (for the Captain it’s what happened on his space ship, the Luminous) and by reliving it, lets you cope with it.

So I got the idea to add the worst things that happened to the four Gao crew members. The only thing we know from the original “Dark Matters” is that Neville’s wife drowned and that Lucile sees the accident that brought the Gao to the dark matter planet. It’s nowhere mentioned what Darak and Terry see.

I have now written the first drafts of the worst things that happened to Neville, Terry, Darak and Lucile in third person (since the Captain cannot know them) and will insert those passages into the original narrative.

I don’t know why it surprises me so, because it’s sort of in the nature of “the worst thing that happened to you in your life”, but nevertheless it amazes me how sad and dark and even gritty and horror-like this has become. I am oddly amazed at how wicked it is what my fingers are typing. Subconscious taking over and stress release from work? I guess that plays its part. I am very excited and greatly fascinated and immensely enjoy this rewrite. The story and the characters are taking over and develop a life of their own and I sit there in amazement and think: awesome!

I have no clue whether the publisher will go along with the different direction the story is taking now and I could understand it if he didn’t. Our deal is that if he likes it, he will re-publish the story under a different imprint and a different name. If he doesn’t like it, I am supposed to get the rights to the story back. In that case I will put it out myself via CreateSpace one day. One way or the other, I will probably market the rewrite as a dark SF or even horror SF piece instead of plain SF. One thing is for sure, I highly enjoy this rewrite and I’ll try to make that show on the page!

Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 4

This will be my last blog post about the Chicon 7 panels. Another four left to report about:

The next panel of interest to me was about genre bending since some of my books are happily mixing genres as well. The next one I will send into the race is a historical fantasy playing itself out on a second world planet with SF elements?!%&?. The main problem with selling books like that is that publishers and bookstores don’t know where to shelf them. There are only three “subcategories” when searching for a book at Amazon and in a book store you have only one choice where to shelf it.

Panelist Ginjer Buchanan, top editor at Penguin’s Ace/Roc imprints, said it’s no big deal for an author these days to write SF as well as Fantasy (maybe under different names) but genre bending will always leave the problem as to where to shelf something.

One nice anecdote from Ginjer – she said that if you are still alive you write fiction, if you are dead what you produced might become literature

The panel I attended after the genre bending one was of a similar theme – SF in the mainstream.

Latest since “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, which is a dystopian novel written by a “literary” author, many so called “literary fiction” or “general fiction” authors have ventured into the land of genre. Some of them don’t mind a genre fiction label, some of them furiously oppose one.

The general opinion of the panelists was that the stigma against SF is declining but it still remains.

A genre “guy or gal” does not get a review in the New York Times for example.

The New Yorker recently did an “SF” issue, funnily though all the “SF” stories came from “mainstream, literary or general fiction” or whatever you want to call them writers.

The discussion strayed a bit into why fantasy is so much more popular these days than SF. One possible answer being that people are “disappointed” with SF. We don’t have stations on the moon and Mars by now as many of the hard SF books of the 50ties and 60ties suggested. Thus people turn to the truly fantastic of fantasy where nobody cares whether it will come true, and have fun with that.

The panelists suggested that we speculative fiction authors should view SF and fantasy as tools to express what we want to, and we should take the freedom to use the conventions of these genres for our convenience. More genre bending ahead after all?

The last convention day is always only a half day since the closing ceremony is around 15:00 and people have to clean up the mess we made over the past five days.

I attended two panels only on day 5, the first of which was “getting the most out of writing groups”. My main interest here was whether there were some tips that I can transfer to my own writing groups. I am in charge of the Odyssey Online critique group, for example.

Here some tips in case you are looking for a group, are a member somewhere or are running a group like me:

1) Go for a high level

2) Look for peers but also for people who are a little ahead of you

3) Look for people who are willing to work hard (critiquing, as well as submitting)

4) Establish clear rules for your writing group

5) If you have a face to face group, the author may not speak while his work is being critiqued. He/she can ask questions etc. after the critiques are done.

6) If you submit a piece that might be offensive to some people announce so in advance.

7) A third of a critique a third is opinion, a third is just talking and one third is the useful stuff.

8) Don’t take everything too gravely to heart.

9) 6 to maximum 10 people is a good size for a face to face group, with the lower end being the better size.

10) Note it in your critique when you find grammar and punctuation mistakes but don’t waste time talking about the grammar in the face to face group.

I will suggest one interesting thing to my online critique group which is the so called “red line”. You can draw a “red line” in a manuscript, indicating where you would have stopped reading if you were an editor or an agent or simply a reader. Of course in the critique environment you read on and critique the whole story or chapter, etc. but as a reader/editor/agent you would have stopped e.g. page 3 line 5 because of xxx reasons.

The last panel of the 70th SF Worldcon I attended was about self publishing once more and in a way it nicely summed up the feeling and vibes of this con from a business point of view.

This panel had a nice mix of two self-published authors, the boss of a small press and the main acquisitions editor of the independent publisher Night Shade, Mr. Jeremy Lassen.

Jeremy brought up an interesting point. He does not like it that the self publishing community has started to call themselves “indies”. The name is already taken – meaning the independent publishers like Night Shade who fought hard for their achievements. A woman from the audience then said the best thing in my opinion: she is an artist and the artists have done already 30 years ago what the authors are trying to do now. They left out the “freelance” or whatever from before their jobs as illustrators or artists or designers. We authors should do that too and simply say “I’m a writer” instead of I am a “published writer”, or “indie published”, or “self-published” writer. I have already done so by omitting the term “self” or “indie” from my publishing related blog posts.

Jeremy made another valiant point, which is that the readers want to have filters. So far, and still, the publishers and agents have provided filters. No really good filter mechanism for indie has emerged yet. Amazon rankings or the few reviewers out there do not and cannot provide adequate filtering of the indie market. We’ll have to see whether some kind of service will appear in the not too far future that can provide this kind of filter for the “indies”.

One suggestion of the panel was that the self-published authors will be the new slush pile. Who has some sort of moderate success with the self-publishing will bop to the surface and be picked up by traditional publishing. With the next book of course, which is not already out there. Only in some exceptional cases will the already self-published work be picked up, meaning, a publisher will only do that if he thinks that there is still a market left for this piece of fiction.

All in all it was a great con and I learned a lot and re-connected with a lot of people and with some new ones. Next year I have already booked my membership for the World Fantasy Con though instead of SF Worldcon because I’ve never been to a World Fantasy Con yet

Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 3

Since I want to finish my Chicon 7 panel report within September, I am combining days 3-5 of the Worldcon into 2 blog entries with reports on four panels each.

On the 3rd Worldcon day I found myself entering controversial territory.

The first panel I attended on Sunday was called “Social Media for Writers”.

The general gist of this panel was you gotta do it and the more you do of it the better.

I have a bit of a different take on that simply because I am not in the luxurious position of being a professional full time writer. Since 99.99 % of all writers do happen to have dayjobs, I am strongly opposed to what I would like to call the social media bubble. Yes, it is necessary and yes, you gotta be out there and yes, you need to have a facebook page as an author these days, but instead of tweeting five hours a day, you should sit behind your computer and write or revise, for heaven’s sake.

Social media must in my opinion be handled with balance.

I personally have a website, this blog here where I post once a week on a fairly regular basis, sometimes a bit more when “stuff” is going on. I am on facebook and I am on twitter but on the latter two I usually show myself only on weekends. I simply do not have the time for tweet conversations and stuff like that, I rather spend the precious non-dayjob time that I have writing, or revising, or researching, or critiquing, or reading, or submitting, or socializing with real-life friends than being available on twitter 24 hours a day.

I think twitter and facebook can be great traps that can drain energy which would be much better spent writing your next book, since, as we have heard, you need a critical mass out there for people to notice you. That means you gotta write and publish, may it be traditionally or otherwise, instead of wasting your time with twitter chit chat. I am relatively sure that the social media hype will fall back on some writers who do too much of it, it will drain them of their creative energy.

Of course there are these “glorious” examples of writers who found their agent or publisher or whatever via twitter, but they are the minority, the rest is in danger of falling into the social media trap and never getting that third or fourth novel written.

Another panel I went to that day had the amazing title “Quantum Physics and Magic Realism”. I didn’t really expect much of it but was pleasantly surprised when I found myself really enjoying the discussion.

Now what exactly is magic realism?

The “definition” given by panelist Catherynne M. Valente is: (not an exact quote) a book written in a journalistic style in order to tell a story that exists on the fringes of reality and plays into politics. But ask someone else and you will get another definition – there is no definition chiseled in stone for the term.

What people agree on though is that the South Americans “invented” it – most of all Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Kafka’s Metamorphosis can also be considered to be one of the first magic realism stories.

Rather than listing here now the works that were more or less briefly discussed during this panel, I would like to point out something Catherynne said that I really liked.

In our day and age the term “post modernism” has sorts of become a synonym for “good” and now “magic realism” is also starting to aspire to that honor. Funny how we are twisting things. A great panel with some food for thought.

I did not go to the final panel that I attended for Worldcon Day 3 for its contents but rather because Gene Wolfe was on the panel and I wanted to see him in action at least once. The panel’s topic was “How to conquer writers block”. Now that is something I luckily have never experienced so far. I always rather tend to have to stop myself from writing and to go back to revising what I have already written.

Nevertheless there were some interesting tips that I shall now pass along.

Gene Wolfe’s main advice was – if you are blocked, go away from words and language, switch off the TV, don’t read, but walk the dog or dig in the garden or do some sports, then it’ll come back to you after you have cleared your mind.

Another thing is to have a routine. His is to write two pages a day when the novel starts, then he speeds up gradually as he goes along and things become clearer to him (he’s also a gardener, not an architect) and by the end, because he knows how it will end, he writes 15 pages a day and catches himself rushing the ending. So his advice in that direction was, don’t do what I do and don’t rush the ending.

Another piece of wisdom or advice from Gene Wolfe was – if the writer is bored it will come across on the page. As the author you have to cry and laugh and giggle and squirm behind your keyboard, if you don’t do that how can the reader? Meaning, if you don’t do that, the story is probably crap and you should abandon it and write the next one.

On Sunday, Worldcon day 4, my first panel was about the SF markets in India and China.

There are some 2.5 or more billion people in those two countries but we don’t know much about them in terms of SF and fantasy.

There is a thriving SF community in China with their main publications of course being in Chinese and not much of it is translated into English. Although SF is by far not the most popular genre in China, simply due to the sheer masses of people the sales figures are something authors in the rest of the world can only dream about. The apparently most successful Chinese SF novel series is called “Three Bodies” that sold some 600,000 copies. The magazine “SF World” is China’s biggest SF publication and the Chinese SF association has some 35,000 members, again, numbers the rest of the world can only dream about.

The main problem is that translations are rare and the rest of the world does not know anything about Chinese SF.

The picture in India is a little different. India is blessed and cursed by the English language one panelist said and for historical reasons there has always been easy access to English books in India but the “cool stuff” is happening in Hindi or Bengali or Tamil. The problem there being that the different languages need to be translated into each other or English as well. For us “westerners” both markets are largely unknown and the major problem remains translation.

Translation in itself is also a major problem, because translations are not being paid for very well and the translator does not receive proper credit for his or her outstanding work.

Stay tuned for the my last Chicon 7 panel report next week with more stuff about self-publication, wokshopping and genre bending.

Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 2

I’d like to call Friday the 31st of August my hero day, since I went to 6 panels starting from 9:00 in the morning and ending at 21:00 in the evening.

The first panel was a classic one – “how to get an agent”. There is at least one of those at every worldcon. Since usually they don’t have the same participants, it does remain interesting to go there and listen to the different stories on how authors found their agents. If I remember correctly three authors and one agent had gathered, the agent again being Joshua Bilmes from Jabberwocky.

One of the authors got her agent at a writer conference during a pitch session, which reminded me painfully of my Hollywood times where I have been to such sessions as well. I found them to be rather horrible and am much more comfortable with writing a query letter, but the lady who got her agent that way says she could not write query letters so decided to go to (and pay for) a pitch session.

She’s an exception though, in most cases it starts with the query letter, and the query letter advice mentioned during the panel was classic stuff: tell the agent in the first sentence what you have (genre, word count), give a short synopsis, then some biographical information. If you have no publication yet, find something else you can talk about. Talk about the favorite movie that the agent might have mentioned in his blog or on his website or talk about where you went to college or whatever, but do mention something so that the agent knows you are not a robot.

Some agents like it when the query letter starts with a smart-ass question, but some agents, Joshua Bilmes being one of them, hates that, so don’t do it with him.

An interesting number was mentioned, your query letter should have a 30 to 40% response rate (meaning requests for a partial resulting from it) or otherwise it is crap. I haven’t heard that statistics before yet. Interesting. My latest query letter, sent out four times so far, generated two requests = 50%. Maybe I was plain lucky or I am finally getting it right?

Next, I went to “self-editing for fiction writers” where five authors discussed about their writing process and how they self edit.

Jeanne Cavelos from Odyssey workshop moderated the panel and I am one of her graduates from all the Odyssey Online courses. I joined the first Odyssey Online course in 2010 and it was my first time to meet Jeanne in the flesh.

Some hints from the self editing panel: Of course every writer is different and you have to find out what works best for you by yourself but here are some techniques you might want to apply:

a) Let the manuscript rest for a bit after you have finished it, write something else, then come back to it for the edit (or subsequent edits).

b) Change the font to get a new fresh impression of your manuscript.

c) The medium affects the perception, print your manuscript out and read it on paper for a change.

d) Make a list of what you need to change after the first draft

e) Search your documents for repetitions, all those, “of course”, “just”, “he smiled”, “she shrugged”, and so forth.

f) Read how-to books (“Self-editing for Fiction Writers” for example is a great one, I already read it myself).

g) If you want to write a series, take a series you like and analyze it, why do you like it, what makes it a good series?

h) Write plot cards and juggle them around.

i) Outline after the draft is done in case you are a gardener writer type (gardener = you have a rough idea where you are going but make up stuff as you go along (I am that type), architect = you plan out everything in minute detail before you start to write).

j) Always re-ask yourself what the theme of your book is.

Just some tips that you might want to try out for yourself. I will definitely test the different font, since I haven’t tried that trick yet.

Another craft panel followed right after that for me – “beyond the first two pages”. You’ve polished your first two pages until you drop, but how do you get things flowing throughout the dreaded second act.

Interestingly, I made not too many notes during this panel. I think it was mostly because it went a bit astray from the topic and the writers on the panel were mostly talking about their general writing process. One thing I did make a note of was the phrase “hooking the reader”, rather think of it as “tantalizing” the reader. Make him want to read the next sentence with every sentence that you write and always ask yourself who is telling the story and why.

After a late lunch I went to what they call Kaffeeklatsches at the worldcon. I love that expression because it is German. I think these sessions got their name from the idea of a kaffeeklatsch as being an informal meeting, but to me as a German kaffeeklatsch sounds like old ladies gathering and gossiping about their neighbors!  Anyway, worldcon kaffeeklatsches are informal meetings with one person of interest and you have to sign up for them in the morning in advance and after eight or ten people have gathered, the kaffeeklatsch is full and no more members may attend.

I managed to sign up for a kaffeeklatsch with agent Eddie Schneider, the new apprentice of Joshua Bilmes from Jabberwocky agency. To remain with the German metaphors we “asked holes into his stomach” and that is what kaffeeklatsches are for, you may ask an agent or an author, editor etc. questions about his field of expertise or his/her books. We of course were all authors without an agent and thus asking Eddie questions upon questions. 75 minutes of that are hard to revisit in a few words.

The general gist was that you need to make your homework and research, research and research again, then polish and polish and polish your manuscript and over-, over- and over-polish your query letter.

A nice gesture of Eddie was that he said simply by being at the con and learning stuff and asking him, we have already elevated ourselves above the 90% of complete crap queries he receives and allowed us to skip the first step of querying him, which is query letter only. We were allowed to send in our first few chapters of our best work mentioning that we were his kaffeeklatsch clientele at the worldcon. That’s very nice of him and of course I have done that first thing after returning home and am waiting for now his reply.

The next panel was funny and quirky at the same time – “how to not get published” – some advise from author Jack McDevitt. He held the panel alone, which I found interesting, maybe he does not want to deal with other panelists. Also a tactic how to avoid an awkward panel

Some of the points he mentioned as for how to make an editor (or agent) reject your manuscript:

1) Don’t overwrite – don’t write too much and say too little.

2) Don’t tell a story but create an experience.

3) Keep factual information to a minimum but the little you do have must be correct.

4) Don’t get lost in detail (e.g. don’t describe how an FTL (faster than light) engine works, get on with it by saying, he pushed a button!

5) Don’t underestimate your reader.

6) Keep characters to a necessary minimum (don’t have too many characters).

7) Don’t introduce four characters at once, let them do something one after the other.

8) Get your grammar etc. right.

9) Create conflict (don’t bore the reader).

10) Have flawed protagonists (don’t write one or two dimensional characters).

11) Don’t write stilted dialogue.

12) Don’t withhold from the reader what the main character knows.

13) Don’t explain.

14) Don’t let exiting things happen off stage.

15) Don’t describe too much but avoid white room syndrome.

All of that was/is valid advice and it was good to be reminded of it in this intensive 75 minute lecture package.

Last but not least for this busy day, I went to a panel about electronic publishing.

The essence of this quite diverse panel was that electronic publishing is here to stay but the common opinion was that paper will also stay.

Some interesting things from this panel that I found noteworthy are:

There are only two forms in which humans absorb information: a codex and a scroll. A codex is a book (magazine, newspaper) and a scroll has come back to fashion these days with our electronic devices where you indeed scroll through any sort of text.

The other, totally unrelated, thing I took away from this panel was that electronic publishing opens up, or revives, all sorts of manuscript lengths. In print you find mostly short story collections or novels = something you can hold in your hand in book form and that has a decent size. The scrolling on electronic devices opens up the so far rather difficult length of being published in between 30,000 and 70,000 words = the novella might become more popular again.

So much for my day two of Chicon 7. More to follow next week.

Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 1

The 70th Science Fiction WorldCon – Chicon 7 happened from the 30th of August till the 3rd of September 2012 in Chicago’s Hyatt Regency Hotel at the River Walk and was the fourth worldcon that I attended after Nippon 2007, Denvention 3 and Anticipation in Montreal.

There is a wide variety of panels at worldcons ranging from “fanish panels” (e.g. Firefly had several panels) over “craft panels” where writers talk about their tips and tricks, over let me call them “academic panels” like discussions on magic realism or genre bending, “business panels” (how to get an agent, etc.), to “science panels”, since we had two former astronauts and NASA staff as guests at the convention.

Five days of worldcon and 17 attended panels are too much for one blog post, so I will divide them into five posts, one for each convention day.

Let me start without much ado with day 1, Thursday the 30th of August 2012.

I skipped the opening ceremony and jumped right into the first panel slot which was about how to moderate a panel This has even some practical dayjob implications for me, since I do a lot of moderation at the company I work for as well, though I usually moderate workshops there and not panels.

Much of the issues covered were how to stop over-eager panelists from getting out of hand (= talking all the time), how to deal with weird questions from the audience and so forth. A fun panel to start with and I especially liked the anecdote of one of the panelists who once wrangled the microphone out of David Brin’s hands in order to give other panelists the chance to throw in a few words too

Actually none of the panels throughout the five worldcon days that I attended went out of hand.

As a side note: the panelists heftily went off on young (and not so young), aspiring (and pro) authors building up “Stonehenge” in front of them on the panelists’ table, showing off their latest (or all of their) titles. They were quite vocal about that and despised it all, saying it was shameless self-promotion taken a bit too far. They especially ranted about some new author who was so bold of putting up an iPad and showing a slideshow with his titles. I will come back to that issue later, after the taxes panel.

Next, I went to a very business-like panel – the writer and taxes.

Joshua Bilmes from Jabberwocky agency and lawyer Howard Rosenblatt, who happens to be the husband of romance writer Darleen Marshall, were giving tips on what to watch out for in contracts with agencies and publishers. Another point was what to deduct for taxes and the interesting topic of estate management. One should see to it that the people one wants to benefit from one’s royalties after one dies are indeed getting that money. Something I have admittedly never wasted a thought on yet.

Some points for writers to look out for in contracts with publishers:

North American publishers usually only “need” English language rights in the USA and Canada.

The second level are English language rights for the whole world, the final level is all language rights for the whole world. The message here was, beware of the latter scheme, since other language rights might be worth renegotiating should the issue of translations come up.

The gentlemen’s advice was, never give a publisher merchandising, calendar, TV or film rights, those are always worth renegotiating if the need or rather the opportunity should arise.

Your contract should also include some ending date, which is especially important in POD (print on demand) cases. You need to define with your publisher when a POD book, which is technically never out of print, is out of print, so that you can get the rights to your work back.

One word of advice concerning agents. A good sign for a scam agent is when he wants a commission on every book you sell. That’s a complete no-no. Agents get money for a book deal, never a chunk of your royalties.

The last panel I went to that day was a discussion among authors about whether to indie or not to indie, meaning to self-publish or not.

Interestingly, the five authors all built up nice little “Stonehenges” in front of them and one of them showed off his iPad with the title slideshow One of the audience members (maybe he had been in the “how to moderate a panel” discussion as well) mentioned that to the authors and their universal answer was: we don’t care, people need to see that we are authors and need to know what we have written.

Throughout the convention I have seen both sides of the coin: some established authors showing off their latest book title, some aspiring authors doing it, some not. Everyone has to decide for him or herself how far he or she wants to go in the self-promotion department, I suppose. I actually find the iPad quite okay, that way you don’t need to drag your books around, which, coming to the convention via international flight is quite appealing to me.

Anyway, before I get into details one general, very important observation that I will stress a few more times throughout the five planned blog entries:

I skipped worldcon for two years (mostly for dayjob reasons), that makes my last con before Chicon 7 Anticipation of Montreal from 2009.

In 2009 everyone still told you: don’t even think of self-publishing, it’ll be the death of your career!

That attitude has completely changed and it pleases me greatly, I must say. This is the power of the people. Enough people doing it, has made it respectable. Enough people doing it, has shaken up the traditional publishing houses. The good news is that self-publishing is no longer a stigma, the bad news is, too many people do it now.

The market is definitely in the very middle of a big shakeup, or, more softly said, a transition phase. More on that topic throughout the upcoming worldcon blog entries, too.

Back to the “to indie or not to indie” panel on day one:

The interesting thing about this particular panel was that all five authors were published traditionally as well as indie.

It has become even a new agent business to help people putting their blacklists, meaning out of print older titles, out on Amazon by themselves.

Other authors have managed to generate some clout somehow and are jumping from self to traditional publishing.

One important message that I heard several times during the con was that you need to have a critical mass for self-publishing. One book is not enough (depending on what you want of course, in all of the blog entries that I am going to make about this topic the assumption is that you (I) want to be a professional writer one day).

If you want to succeed you need to have a critical mass of books out there. Something like 6 books (and that means novels) seems to be a sort of tipping point from where the stuff might develop a life of its own (if you are lucky). The guy with the iPad had 13 titles out there for example.

Another point mentioned during this panel was reviews. Reviews, even by famous sites, don’t seem to do that much for you. The iPad guy had a review in Boing Boing and his sales spiked for a bit, but two days later, the hype was gone.

There were some extreme opinions stated in this panel: A year ago it was – self-publication is your last resort; now traditional publication is your last resort. I personally wouldn’t go that far, because: don’t underestimate the traditional publishers, they do this for a long time already and should know what they’re doing.

Nevertheless, the market is in turmoil at the moment.

So much for the panels on day 1 of Chicon 7. More will follow soon.

Chicago photos

Just to complete the Chicago travel diary – here is the link to some selected photos on my flickr account.

From tomorrow I’ll be blogging about the convention and its panels, so stay tuned

Chicago Nikki – 3

Today was girl’s day – meaning shopping, and I won’t bore people with that. Only that I am always for clothes shopping whenever I leave Japan, since it is not easy to find wearable pants and shoes for European sized women in Japan

After the shopping spree and dumping the load in the hotel room, I took a little walk along the Chicago river towards the lake in an attempt to get a lake view but got quite a different view instead. Between the river and the row of skyscrapers on the river’s southern side are three layers of road, let me call them ground level, first and second basement. Ground level is for normal traffic, first basement is a sort of highway = through traffic, and I am not sure what the second basement is usually used for, but currently it has a quite special use.

Walking down the stairs to the river walk (a nice path between trees and bushes mostly used by joggers) a cluster of broken down police cars greeted me that looked very much like the finale of the Blues Brothers. Some twenty to thirty police cars piled up in a multiple car crash with the front car lying dramatically upside down. For a second I thought this was for real, the next second I thought, hey, it’s only police cars, this can’t be real, the third second I thought this is from Blues Brothers, but hey that’s how many years ago? 20? (It’s actually 32 years ago already! The original Blues Brothers movie is from 1980). Not very likely that they leave this stuff lying around there for 32 years.

Several other people were walking past as bedazzled as I was, snapping photos, and I asked one of them but he said he had no clue what this was about either and left again.

I discovered a bored looking security guy in a yellow vest and decided to approach him and ask him what this was about.

He said that this is a set from a movie called Doomsday 3 (I suppose it’s the 3rd part of this one here, though I couldn’t find a part 2)

They are apparently shooting the thing around Chicago and the police car pile up will remain there for another two months, the security guy said. The car pile up is a mere 100 meters away from my hotel. Interesting.

I completed my walk to the lake shore, but there was not much lake to see at this spot because of a large marina with huge and rich boats, one nicer than the other (some photos on Flickr later, as well as from the car pile up (one pic is already on twitter)).

Plan for tomorrow is river cruise and the Gateway Park with Ferris wheel and other attractions. And from Thursday onwards it’ll be convention!