Andrea K. Höst's Blog, page 17

Sales to Date

At the beginning of the year I noted that I'd hit 10,000 sales by the end of 2012.  Prompted by Patty Jansen's informative post, I've updated my figures for those interested in self-pub stats.

Sales by year:(Date range is 1 December 2010 to 30 September 2013.  Freebies and not yet reported sales not included.)
Sales by store: Amazon 17832 Apple 224  Barnes & Noble 677  BordersAU 2  CreateSpace 437  FNAC 4  Kobo (via Smashwords) 42  Kobo Writing Life 141  LivrariaCultura 1  Smashwords.com 347  Sony 29 
Earnings:I've been totting up last year's figures for my taxes (which run from 1 July to 30 June in Australia) and my (gross) royalty income looks to be around $16,600.  This is less than last financial year, despite what the sales numbers suggest - but mainly because Amazon pays by cheque about two months after you earn the money.

Popularity:As you can see, The Touchstone Trilogy is still by far my most popular books.  Partly that's the power of series and first book freebies, but it's also simply very popular and gets very good word of mouth.  Stained Glass Monsters remains my least successful (ironic, given it's one of my favourites).

It wasn't until I'd totted these figures up that I could see that both And All the Stars and Hunting had performed quite well for stand alones.  Their numbers will no doubt drop off now we're well past their release dates, but I'd expect to continue to sell several hundred each year.

Sales Venues:It would be nice to believe that sales will continue to improve at this rate, eventually giving me a comfortable income on which to write full time, but as Patty pointed out recently, self-publishing is a very unpredictable industry.  I was completely unaffected by the Kobo debacle - but as you can see it's not a primary market of mine.  [It will be interesting to see if that changes after a Kobo-related promotion I'm theoretically participating in at the end of the year.]

Like most self-publishers, Amazon is by far my best outlet.  Both Barnes & Noble and Apple improved this past year as a direct result of Bookbub, which is a cheap books notification service which has been one of the few effective promotion tools lately.

Future:The big money in self-publishing tends to be in certain genres, and also in writing series.  Unfortunately I don't think I have the writing skills/style to do well in the big money genres (thrillers, romance and erotica can be difficult to write!), but I am at least writing series books this year.  Typically, I'm writing the beginnings of three series at once (while finishing off Bones) and the things I'm interested in writing tend to not match up with the types of books which become immensely popular.

But I am slowly finding a repeat audience.  And I'm having fun - which is probably what counts most for me. :)

Titles, titles

So, currently I'm working on four series at once.  I often jump back and forth between books, and this suits my mood at the moment.  I'm on track to get Bones of the Fair out in November (I work on it on the train in the morning when I'm at my writing best).

One of the books is the first in a series I've been itching to start for a while - a "virtual reality game" plot involving AI's, personal spaceships, duelling, and all sorts of over the top and unlikely things (along with addressing some of the questions of gender and identity which arise playing avatars online).  The game (which is called Dream Speed) is set in a post-singularity universe, and while I know the name of the first volume (Snug Ship), I've been tossing around what to call the series.

So, given that you know nothing about this book except that it's about someone playing a virtual reality game involving spaceships in the far future, which of these series titles would catch your attention?
Next LevelThe Singularity GameDream SpeedThere's a poll in the right hand column of the blog, so feel free to select one, or comment on this post.  [I'm sure I'll think of more names in the year or so it takes me to write a book, but starting impressions can't hurt.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 19 : Evil and the Fantastic

Part 19 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Warren Rochelle's blog. This month we're discussing evil and the fantastic.

The women of Riddick (minor spoilers)

Riddick, third in the movie series, has a weaker plotline, and a big drop in how it treats women, which is quite something to say given how women have always walked a grey line in these movies.  Pitch Black was a real rarity in SF (and any other genre) terms, because it appeared to be a story about a morally ambiguous woman - right up until her plotline was sacrificed on the altar of a charismatic man.

Fry is not a bad person, but in a moment of peril she puts her life over those of her human cargo - and then has to step up and be responsible for that cargo.  The story is basically Fry's story - and the initial script basically reversed the final deaths - Riddick dies so Fry can live.  Although it is an unfortunate ditching of interesting woman in favour of ultra-cool guy, Pitch Black is more powerful the way it ends, and that final protest of Riddick's: "Not for me".  Our expectations are turned on our heads when Riddick, the dark soul, the murderer theoretically gone beyond the moral event horizon, survives while Fry was the "last girl" whose journey of redemption we had been following is killed saving him.

Nor is Fry the only interesting female in the movie - there's the cynical (if unable to duck) Sharon, and the girl-in-disguise Jack.  They're all there trying to survive, and they appear whole and independent.

We don't see any of their breasts.

The Chronicles of Riddick, while  a serious U-turn in terms of tone, gave us more of Jack's story and her positioning of Riddick as a father figure.  The movie also included a variety of other women - from an air elemental to an ambitious wife.  Again, this is as much Jack's journey as it is Riddick's, and again the woman whose journey we've followed is killed for Riddick.

So, going into the third movie, Riddick, my expectations weren't entirely positive.  I expected a movie which showed off how hard-core Riddick was - which is precisely what I got - but I also expected an interesting female character or two, most likely ending up fridged.  That I most definitely didn't get.

It's particularly odd because the movie goes out of its way to parallel Pitch Black, making the 'return to before' situation the crux of the plot - it's doesn't make for half so powerful a story, but there's fun in watching Riddick being harder than hard.

It's not fun watching the women in this story.

There are three female appearances in Riddick.  The first is four naked ladies in the bed of the Necromonger ruler.  They did some languid writhing.

The second is a captive of one of the bounty hunters - a minor bounty who it is clearly suggested has been sexually abused by her captor.  Her brief appearance serves only to demonstrate that one of the bounty hunters is a horrible person.

The third is Dahl, one of the 'less bad' bounty hunters.  A no-nonsense sniper (with some physical resemblance to Fry), Dahl:

1. Is hit on by the extra-bad bounty hunter.
2. Tells him she's not interested in men.
3. Is shown topless giving herself a basin bath while Riddick watches from outside the window.
4. Fights off an assault from the extra-bad bounty hunter.
5. Exchanges sex-badinage with Riddick.
6. Is shown "straddling" Riddick during the final rescue scene.

She doesn't have any emotional journey, beyond some ambiguity as to whether she is attracted to Riddick despite being (presumably) a lesbian.

It's hard to believe this was made by the same creative team as the first two movies.

Paper and Ebook copy bundling

As you may or may not know, Amazon is launching something called Kindle MatchBook, where the paper copy of a book will be bundled with a discounted or free copy of the ebook.  This launches in October some time.

I saw no strong reason not to participate (I don't usually like to advantage one retailer over others, but my paper sales are very small compared to my ebook sales), so for those of you who buy paper copies and like to have e-copies, I've signed my books up for the ebook to be bundled free with the purchase of physical books available through Amazon.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 18 : Mythical Creatures

Welcome to Part 18 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature! Today, Sylvia Kelso and Warren Rochelle join me in discussing mythical creatures.
Andrea K Höst What makes a mythical creature?

Let me tell you about the darati.

Twice the height of a tall man, but very narrow, they dwell in birch forests: their pale mottled skin providing a natural camouflage, while the trunks offer them support and shield them from winds which might knock them from their feet. Darati are patient hunters. They stand, and they wait, usually near water sources, or bushes heavy with edible berries. When prey comes within reach, they exhale a thin mist which disorients and makes drowsy. There is no future for any who fall asleep at the feet of a darati.

Now, let me tell you about dragons.

Your reaction to that second sentence is the difference between fantasy and myth. Darati are not mythical creatures, but rather fantastical ones. They have no weight, and the word 'darati' is as thin a conjuring as the creature I spent the last few minutes creating. No creature I will ever invent could hope to bring with it the tidal wave of association, the almost contemptuous familiarity, the endless flood of possibility in the statement: Here be dragons.

Beautiful, dangerous, villainous, munificent, terrible, transformative. Are dragons rivers, or greed or dinosaurs? Yes, they are. Dragons are thousand stories, old and new. A mental image imprinted into the common id. A different image, perhaps, particularly as you move from one culture to the next, but a word with an almost unrivalled strength. It was not so long ago that dragons were as real as elephants.

Here be dragons. A phrase used on maps. A deliberate conjury not of the unknown, but of myth. Here, the mapmaker suggests, might exist those things that we have all heard of, but are not here, within the bounds of this map. Beyond the borders of the known world live not unspecified ideas of monsters, but all the ones the stories have told us are out there. This outside area is where the mermaids, the rocs, the pegasi enjoyed something resembling existence. The darati never lived there.

The choice to use a mythical creature in a fantasy is a double-edged sword. There is an immense, immediate emotional and intellectual reaction to the word – the idea – of dragon. But this reaction can range from "I love dragon stories!" to "Not another dragon story". Readers will bring their pre-established idea of what a dragon is to the story, and compare your story to all the other stories about dragons, and ask if you're doing anything new – or be disappointed when Your dragon is not Their dragon.  And your dragon will never quite be 'yours' either, because it started from a base template of myth built up by your own experience of dragon stories.

There are, of course, more obscure mythical creatures. I came across a new one to me when researching the Food in Fantasy topic, and discovered the Cinnamon Bird. More obscure mythical creatures will perform their conjury only for the select few who have heard of them, but even so they have a certain something extra. So why use the darati? Why invent from scratch creatures whose name performs no conjury, whose existence lacks the resonance and power of myth?

Perhaps simply because all myths had a beginning, a first time that tale was told. There's always room for another story.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.
Sylvia Kelso “Mythical” in this title cd mean, firstly, non-existent, including invented beasts, or secondly, beasts out of myth and legend, non-existent or not.

A fantasy writer inventing a beast naturally asks, Can I make this seem original? A fantasy writer looking to a legendary beast – a dragon, a unicorn - *knows* that s/he faces the answer given by one of Barbara Hambly’s vampires, when asked if they had ever tried to use other ways of getting blood: “Everything has been tried.”

And with the famous mythical beasts everything HAS been tried. Yet, perversely, if you do use/recycle one, yours will never be *quite* the same as every other version. If only because your writing style, hopefully in a good sense, is not like anyone else’s.

Way back in the last century, before I ever wrote anything that cd. be labeled fantasy, I did decide to write what I called a fairytale. It had only two parameters: It started with “once upon a time” and it had a monster/weird thing per chapter. At the time my brain was stuffed with enthusiastic research into antiquity and the second parameter was a cake-walk. Said “monsters” included an Assyrian hawk-headed god, a chimera, of sorts, a serpent oracle, a couple of Gilgamesh Scorpion Men, and, among others – a unicorn.

I did not actually think,
how can I make this unicorn original? Nor did I rehearse all the versions I knew, right down from James V of Scotland’s famous “Fenced Unicorn” tapestry that I finally saw in Stirling Castle, a building replete with Scotland’s own heraldic beast. I didn’t even recall the airiest and most delicate of the modern sugar and good-magic incarnations, in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Mine just came through the avenues of the story – written in longhand, omg – and – um – there it was.

At this point, Our Hero and his Faithful Sidekick (I was also very traditional about questers in those days) had passed the set-up stage, weathered their early tests and were facing Serious Danger Number One – Lost in Desert During Murderous Pursuit. Which had modulated to Lost in Desert in a Sand-storm. Anddd:

Perhaps it was the thirst that made them heedless when the wind’s regular onslaught broke into veering gusts; and perhaps it was the thirst that hid from them the way the sand now crunched thin and hard under their feet; certainly it was the thirst, locking them into a stupor of endurance, which concealed Sweetwater’s true avenger until it was too late.

Two sand flurries had clashed, an eddy recoiling upon itself, and it came upon them through the curtain, so all they saw was a flash of solider, linearly moving white; all they heard was the crr-unch crr-unch of approaching hooves matched to the grunts of a galloping beast. Then something hit the mare’s right side with the impact of a new-fired cannonball.

The shock bowled her right off her legs and over the prince at her left shoulder, down in the sand beyond him with a great horse scream of pain and shock and fright. The overset prince caught one flash of milk-grey belly and thrashing legs as they arced over him; a sector of open sand; then at right angles to the rest a pair of white, driving hocks that plunged like a fired bow and were gone.

He was rolling in the sand, a snapped spear haft vertical at his elbow, Ervan and the bay a mist shadow beyond his feet. Beside him, all her side a flaring scarlet shield of blood, the mare was trying to get up. And beyond her the attacker had wheeled to complete the kill.

Ripples of silver hide glistened through the sand murk, slender steel muscles played above cloven yellow hooves. It had a horse’s head but a goat’s beard, a pure gold eye, cold and impassive as a surgeon’s, and from the silver forehead a length of gleaming, whorled tortoise-shell was levelled like a spear. The gleam was a lacquer of fresh blood. The goat’s chin tucked under as it trained its weapon on the fallen mare, the delicate hocks were flexing like tempered steel.

The prince struggled onto an elbow. As he did so he saw the pain and terror in his mare’s eyes, and suddenly the sand mist went a bloody, mottled red. His hand shot to the snapped spear. He wrenched it out and floundered up, yelling, “Come on!”

Though it came out as a mere cough the movement sufficed. The unicorn’s eye flicked. Quick as a great cat it changed aim in mid-career, leapt the mare with one feather-light spring and charged the prince.

He had dropped on one knee. Now he planted the other on the broken spear butt and leant it up and outward, gripping it in both hands. The blade was just above his head. He knew the haft was too short, he knew that even if he aimed true the unicorn would transfix him, and he did not care. He had forgotten all about the Quest. He knew only that his innocent mare was dying, and he meant to have her revenge.

The golden eye leapt at him, the nostril flaring like a great red rose. He heard its quick breath and somehow admired the splendid force with which its hind feet punched the sand. I shall die with honour, he thought, and dropping the spear point below the round ringed boss of the levelled horn, he trained it between the cushions of that sleek silver breast.

But suddenly a shadow sprang over him. Something flashed; there was a brazen scream, an axe-like clunk! A silver projectile hurtled past, a spray of blood drenched his face, and the swing’s impetus dropped Ervan on his knees beside the prince, yelling, “Got him! Got it! Look!”

Out in the fog the unicorn pivoted, a splendid, deadly javelin haft, rearing, beating the air with its forefeet, braying with rage and pain; and the prince saw what Ervan had got.

The horn had been lopped. Its point was gone, and the trunk played like a fountain, three or four simultaneous sprays of blood.

No, my unicorn wasn’t pretty, or in the least simpatico. I did hope it was powerfully vivid, menacing, and very definitely Elsewhere. But the creative unit, aka the Black Gang, were operating in their usual mode, right down to the lopped horn, which, like the heads of cattle I had seen dehorned back home in Australia, would spout not one but two or three jets of blood.

The BG’s nature emerged even more clearly at the Last Major Battle, a confrontation with the Scorpion Men which was going to be awesome, a heraldic swash-and-buckle, larger than life – in fact, mythical. Unfortunately, the Black Gang extrapolated the consequences of swinging a sword two-handed at a six-foot high monster while standing on an ice lake, and ye heraldry degenerated into an ice-hockey pile-up over a collapsed Rugby scrum.

The consequences were definitely catastrophic, but the actual event? Traumatic, ferocious, bloody. Yep. Mythical? Well, er – no. It seems if I do mythical, with beasts or anything else, it very definitely turns out nearly all my own.

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “The Honor of the Ferrocarril” appeared in Gears and Levers 3 from Skywarrior Books, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in October 2013.
Warren Rochelle Necessary Monsters

According to Jorge Luis Borges, “…there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination, and thus the dragon arises in mThe Book of Imaginary Beings xii). It is what these monsters, the mythical beasts that populate the wild countries of the fantastic, might be necessary for that I want to consider briefly here. What some of the parts do they play in the tales we read (and write) of these countries—as necessary monsters are they symbol, metaphor? Archetypes of the monstrous, evil—or rather something more amoral, wildness, the uncontrolled?
any latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster …” (

For Le Guin, the answer as to what her dragons are necessary for might be, to all of these questions, yes, more or less. In a previous essay, “The Emersonian Choice: Connections between Dragons and Humans in Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle (Extrapolation 47.3, 417-426), I have discussed this at some length. Here, briefly, dragons and humans were once “all one people, one race, winging and speaking the True Language.” Some became more in “love with flight and wildness” and “Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned …” (Le Guin, Tehanu 12). They become two people. Dragons choose to be; we chose to make. Dragons choose to be Nature; we choose to be active in Nature—and learning this, for both dragons and humans in Earthsea, becomes an essential act—for humans of being fully human.

Tolkien writes of the necessity of monsters in a different way in his famous essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics.” Originally a lecture, he took on the critics who wanted to downplay the “fantastical elements” in the poem. He argued, instead, they were the key to the narrative, and the poem should studied as a work of art. In other words, Beowulf needs his monsters, his mythical beasts, Grendel and his mother, and the dragon. To be the hero he wants to be, he must have monsters to fight. He is the Good; they are the Evil. He, to be a hero, must fight evil.

To return to Le Guin, she argues, in her essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” that not only must the hero, the Good Guy, have monsters, or Evil to fight, but that good must not just fight evil, it must embrace it—“this monster is an integral part of the man and cannot be denied …” (in Language of the Night 56). The dark, the monster, “The shadow is on the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind” (59) and if we are to live “in the real world, [we] must admit that the hateful, the evil, exist within [ourselves]” (60). We are the monsters, the mythical beasts.

But, are all mythical beasts monsters, are they all dark emblems of evil? What of unicorns? Surely these mythical beasts are not malevolent. Well, it depends on the story. According to A Natural History of the Unnatural World, unicorns are “fierce, wild and untameable by nature,” but “[they become] meek and gentle with [their] young and in the presence of human virgins” (78). In the Thurber classic, “The Unicorn in the Garden,” the title beast is indeed untamed, but it is not tearing up the garden, rather it is “cropping the roses.” It eats the lily from the man’s hand. Gentle and wild, a “mythical beast”—and perhaps there, perhaps not. Perhaps here it is more about believing that such beasts do have a reality. But the man does use the unicorn to get rid of his wife; he does lie to the psychiatrist; he is not wholly innocent, no matter how justified his actions may seem to most readers (including this one).

Which brings me back to the beginning: necessary monsters, essential metaphors, living symbols. We are both dark and light, and the dark is integral to being human as much as the light. Yes, monsters are necessary and sometimes we find them in our myths. Sometimes we find them by looking into our mirrors.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). His short fiction can be found in such journals as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, Forbidden Lines, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. He is at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction, in which all the stories have happy endings, sort of.   Please see http://warrenrochelle.com

Contradictions

This is the cat who will run a mile if the slightest drop of water strikes her furry brown back.

Gone Home (no spoilers)

Gone Home is a recently-released indie game which I guess could be called forensic story discovery.  You're Katie, just back from a grand European holiday - only to find your family home deserted.  You explore.

The gameplay revolves around picking up various documents and objects which trigger a voice over letter from your sister telling you what's been going on with her life - and other documents which give you a new insight into your parents, until you finally put together the story of why there's no-one in the house.

It's an intriguing piece - the voice over is beautifully done - and has a big dose of nineties nostalgia which is fun all of itself.  Though I found the game a little short, I was kept curious till the end - and it's very cheap, so well worth checking out for a different sort of game - or a new way of telling a story.

Status Update: Drafts and Games

This has been a go-slow writing time for me after pushing myself to get Hunting out.  Drafting Pyramids is fairly research-heavy comparatively, since though I have a passing familiarity with the various cultures I'm playing with - and intend to distort them almost out of recognition - I still need to increase my understanding of their starting points before the alternate circumstances kick in (technically the alternate starts in 18th Dynasty Egypt, but the main impacts don't hit 'til later).

Not that I haven't started getting words on the page.  This book (and the next few) are roughly plotted out in my head, but I've put it on hold for the moment to prepare to switch to Bones.  [Er, prepare by being distracted into writing some smut.]  Bones will be done by the end of the year (there's really only some revision and adjustment to be done on that - the first draft was at about the 9/10 point).  [I'm debating pushing it over to the beginning of January just for award cut off dates convenience - we'll see.]

I'll start on that once my mental energy has recovered - it's been chewed up the last few weeks by a somewhat stressful project at my day job, and entertaining domestic issues, not least:


That was fun to come home to.  Both the power and the phone line attach to that pole, so, yeah...

The biggest consumer of my free time for the next few months is likely to be Final Fantasy XIV.  FFXIV was the second MMO released in the Final Fantasy series and tanked soon after launch thanks to severe lack of content.  It was pulled, revised, and has just gone into open beta.

It has swallowed me whole.

Fortunately I do most of my quality writing on the train to work in the morning, so this does not mean all writing progress stops.  And the mid-level doldrums are sure to hit and make the game less attractive.

Final Fantasy XI was my first full-on MMO.  I lived and breathed it for a while, and then crashed and quit.  That seems to be my standard operating procedure with MMOs.

I always name my MMO characters after my book characters, and FFXIV has Rennyn.  This is Rennyn's current mid-level mage costume (it's not class specific - her main class is Thaumaturge, and I am looking forward to that armour set very much).


I'll be playing on Gungnir, if anyone wants to say "Hi".

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 17 : Intrusive Fantasy

Part 17 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Chris Howard's blog. This month we're discussing intrusive fantasy.