Kelly McCullough's Blog, page 81

More Grist for the Mill

From Wired Magazine's Danger Room comes this cool article about America's future cyborg army.

Okay, which one of us will be the first to combine all the cool stuff about the new Twilight planet and cyborg armies??

Friday Cat Blogging

Lazy Friday Afternoon Nap Cat



Lazy Friday Afternoon Nap Cat



Lazy Friday Afternoon Nap Cat



Lazy Friday Afternoon Nap Cat

We're #2!

A new Harris poll shows that of the people who read fiction, a surprising percent (surprising to me, anyway,) read science fiction. Maybe there's hope for my alter ego's comeback, after all!

Literary vs. Genre Fiction

I saw this editorial in Apex and was reminded of the conversation we had at Wyrdsmiths about literary fiction.

Also, on a similar sort of note, yesterday, SF Signals: Mind Meld had a piece on the next big genre stars, in their own words. Though clearly there's been some mistake, as no Wyrdsmith was interviewed for this piece. I did notice one local boy made good though... see if you can spot him.

More about planet Zarmina

I love that the folks over at .io9 have been geeking out almost as much as I have over the new planet Zarmina (Gliese 581g,) which is the planet that was discovered in the "Goldilock's Zone" (not too close, not too far) from its red dwarf sun to support life. Today, they have up a poster gallery of Zarmina 100 years after colonization...



For myself, I'm fascinated by the fact that Zarmina/Gloaming/Gliese 581g doesn't rotate on its axis. It's in the same kind of orbit around its sun as our moon is to us. In the article I read, scientists have speculated that the temperate zone would be right along this horizon/twilight line. How weird/cool is that? Plus, since it doesn't rotate, I spent a good portion of the day trying to imagine weather on this world. It's going to have one hot side, one cold side, and a line of moderate temperatures, but no spin... does that mean the weather will be static? Or will there be constant storms where the two halves meet?

Of course, I'm already starting to try to figure out any religion/spiritual concepts sentient life on Zarmina/Gloaming/Gliese 581g might have. So much of our own culture is based on the fact that we have day and night, sun and moon, and other groups of two that it would be interesting to try to figure out how someone might conceptualize a worldview where there was dark, light, and in-between. And time would be quite meaningless,* since it would ALWAYS be sunrise (or sunset) and that would only change if you moved closer or further from the horizon/twilight band.

Does anyone know if it has a moon? I suspect it can't attract one without spin, but I don't really know. Do Uranus's moons roll around it, since it's rolling head over heel in space?

You can see why I don't write a lot of space SF. Although I suppose I know just enough to be dangerous, which is, in point of fact, the perfect position to write from. I may just have to set a story here, just because I've spent far too much of my waking hours trying to imagine living there already.

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* My friend Rachel told me via my LJ: "What I found interesting about Gliese 581g is that its year is only 36.6 days. If its orbital eccentricity is high enough, that could conceivably make up for tidal locking to produce an analog to seasons. Except they'd only be a week long or so (if there were three per orbital period)." EXTRA COOL!

Morning Bits and Pieces

I followed Lucienne Diver's link on Twitter to this: Misty Massey: What They Really Mean, which is a humorous take on what reviewers are saying when they review your book. I didn't find it particularly laugh-out-loud, but I'm also extremely lucky that haven't gotten that many negative reviews... except for the one I can still quote almost verbatim, which ended with the line: "Less of Morehouse is better." :P

Also, the October issue of Apex is up.

I'd also like to point out the continuing discussion in the comments of the post about Self-Promotion, an Argument For. Perhaps ironically (tellingly?), only Wyrdsmiths have weighed in... which makes a case that none of us know anything about promotion, since we seem to be the only ones reading our blog. Or, perhaps makes my/their case that only stellar content attracts readers (depending on whether you believe this blog has is or doesn't have it.) :-)

Royalties and Backlists

Over on his blog, Jim C. Hines analyzes his royalty statement. The charts and his discussion are plenty interesting all by themselves, but he just casually says a couple of things in his blog that really resonate with my experience.

First of all, I have to say that I'm impressed that Hines has so many books that have earned out. It apparently takes me a lot longer to do that (perhaps I'm slightly better paid). However, I'm only JUST NOW getting royalties for my second book, Dead Sexy, which was originally published in 2007 (and had a Romance and Science Fiction Bookclub h/c edition.) So, of five books, two of them now earn royalties.

But, on the flip side (and knocking liberally on wood) at least all of my books are still IN print, which by five years into Lyda Morehouse's career all her books were out of print.

Which is why I agree that having in-print back list is really important. It's tough to encourage readers to pick up book #4 in a series (even if you wrote each to stand alone) when #2 is already out of print, which happened to me as Lyda.

Secondly, Hines says, "Some authors who get that bajillion-dollar advance for their first book. I'm not one of them. The slower but steady approach seems to be working for me though, at least so far."

This is something I think about a lot. I have had fits of absolute jealousy over other authors' advances, but one thing I try to keep in mind is that it's much harder to earn out a "bajillion" dollars than it is ten thousand. And, while a bajillion dollars would be nice to have in pocket, I have to imagine that unless you happen to actually be the one-in-a-million that actually earns out the bajillion, your editor/publisher will have to be disappointed in your sales figures. Whereas, if you at least break even for them, they might be more likely to keep hiring you for those midlist jobs that someone's got to fill, right?

Though I still dream of a bajillion dollar advance, I think I'd continue to trade it in for a long and glorious career.

Self Promotion, the Argument For

Since we've gone back and forth on this blog about the effectiveness of author self-promotion, I'd like to point out an interesting discussion going on. Catherynne Valente has this lovely post that makes a lot of sense to me, personally. It is apparently a reaction to something Sarah Prineas said over here.

Self Promotion, the Arguement For

Since we've gone back and forth on this blog about the effectiveness of author self-promtion, I'd like to point out an interesting discussion going on. Catherynne Valente has this lovely post that makes a lot of sense to me, personally. It is apparently a reaction to something Sarah Prineas said over here.

Astronomy Photo of Day

Like brush strokes on a canvas, ridges of color seem to flow across this scene. But here, the canvas is nearly 3 light-years wide and the colors map emission from ionized gas in the Lagoon Nebula, recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Also known as M8, the nebula is a star forming region about 5,000 light-years distant in the constellation Sagittarius. Hubble's remarkably sharp, close-up view reveals undulating shapes sculpted by the energetic light and winds from the region's new born stars. Of course, the Lagoon nebula is a popular target for earthbound skygazers, too. It features a prominent dust lane and bright hourglass shape in small telescopes with wider fields of view.

Photo and commentary courtesy of NASA.