Watts Martin's Blog, page 3

I hate to say it, but���

…I may start writing a web serial sometime soon.

All right, I don’t really hate to say that, of course—I’ve been thinking about it off and on for years. It’s possible that a new story that I’ve started may be a good candidate. I’ll have to get several months’ worth of updates in the bag before feeling confident trying this, though, so it might not start until next year. We’ll see.

I still have to figure out where to serialize it, too. As much as “serialize it everywhere!” sounds like the right answer, it could quickly get exhausting given that posting to each archive site is multiple steps and difficult to automate. I may stick to just my blog (http://cprints.ranea.org) and probably the LiveJournal mirror (which I’ve almost but not quite automated), with links to the posts from my SoFurry and FA accounts. In some ways I’d prefer to keep the story a separate “stream” from the blog, but mixing the stream doesn’t seem to hurt the audience of other people who’ve done it, so.

If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

Twitter, LiveJournal and navel-gazing

I’ve observed in the past that LiveJournal has been disrupted more by Twitter than any traditional “blogging” platform—like it or hate it, Twitter’s perfect not only for status updates (its original use case) but for just about any quick “hey, I’d like to share this with friends and followers” impulse. Tumblr is something of an extra sucker punch: while there are things that LJ does that Tumblr doesn’t, nearly everything they both do—from following your friends’ posts to providing a safe haven for teen-to-twentysomethings to get righteously angry about the state of the world—Tumblr does objectively better.

But one of the things that LJ does better than nearly anything else is right in the name: journaling. A typical LiveJournal post was obviously much longer than anything on Twitter, but it also tended to be more personal than what we usually see on Tumblr. (Which isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of Tumblrs with surprisingly personal stuff on them, but the platform has a very different character that tends to be far more anonymous than LJ. This is both good and bad, which I’ll circle back to.) The only thing that’s ever matched that is, well, blogging: WordPress, Blogger, or something wacky like Octopress, which is what I’m using here.

And, frankly, Twitter has been disappointing me more and more as a company. I know a bunch of LJ users all got up and left because they didn’t like the direction they thought LJ was going, but folks, compared to Twitter LJ is owned and managed by the best people on the planet. I’m one of the ones who “moved” to Dreamwidth, but I’ve gotta admit that not only has nothing bad happened to or with LJ in years, the changes they’ve made make it feel a lot more modern than DW.

Lately I’ve been missing journaling in a way I haven’t for years. I’m not sure why, but I’ve noticed I’ve been tweeting less, checking Twitter a little less obssessively, and being quite inattentive to Tumblr. My tech blog, Coyote Tracks, is hosted at Tumblr and has a somewhat staggering following, at least by my standards—but my burnout with web development has left me less interested in keeping up with tech trivia and more interested in writing.

That’s why I turned my LiveJournal into an echo of an ostensibly writing-focused blog, “Coyote Prints.” All well and good, except for two things. First, there’s not that much to say about writing for me.

Second, what do I do with the posts that aren’t about writing, aren’t about tech, and are too long and/or introspective for Twitter?

For years the answer has been “nothing,” but I’m not sure that’s really the right answer. I feel like I should, at least occasionally, actually be… journaling.

What’s interesting—and also embarrassing—is how much I realize I’m missing on LiveJournal. I don’t think to check my Friends page more than once in a blue moon, and a lot of stuff happens that I’m not paying attention to. Friends I (clearly) don’t stay in good touch with moving across the country, that sort of thing. I’ll try to be better about that, but it’s not easy to get back into that habit once it’s broken.

I’m not sure whether to post journal-ish things solely to LiveJournal or to keep doing the slightly pain-in-the-butt “manual echo” between Coyote Prints and LJ; I’ll probably stick with the latter for now, although LJ’s wonderful ability to do “friend-locked” posts largely only exists on LJ.

Quiet around these parts

Updates since my last post, all the way back in April:

I did attend the novel writing workshop, and it was fantastic. The point of the exercise was, in a lot of ways, to tear down everyone’s novel outlines and reconstruct them in stronger fashion. I was told that Kismet was too “thin” in the version I brought with me, which wasn’t at all surprising—I’m good at novellas, and had more of a novella’s worth of plot than a novel’s worth. I ended up with new tools for visualizing plot structure, and with a stronger plot in its reconstructed form than what I had before. I’m still adding to that plot, and have started the rewrite of what I had. So far it’s easier; in large part that’s due to the workshop, and to some degree it’s simply because I know more about the story now than when these scenes were first written (which I think was in 2012).

In my last post I was job hunting; now I am, in fact, employed full-time as a technical writer. I like this. It may give me enough distance from programming to start liking it again, too, which would be terrific.

Something I didn’t mention, but should have: I have a new Ranea novella called “Going Concerns” in the FIve Fortunes anthology, which is five unrelated novellas from authors Phil Geusz, Renee Carter Hall, Mary E. Lowd, Bernard Doove, and me. It’s nominally a mystery, although in a lot of ways it’s more comedy. You can buy it from FurPlanet, and as near as I can tell nowhere else right now, and only in physical print form. I’ll make an update here when the distribution expands.

I don’t have any announcements about upcoming stories at this point; I’m long overdue at getting older ones into ebook form, and I’d like to say I’m working on that, but it’s more fair to say I’m thinking about working on that. A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood is overdue for an ebook release, for instance, and there are some other Ranea stories that could be polished up. (Maybe. Most of the old ones really aren’t all that good, to be honest about it, but maybe they can form the basis of new ones.)

Novel workshop and etc.

I haven’t mentioned this here yet, but I’ve been accepted into this year’s Novel Writers Workshop at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The novel I’m workshopping is a hard sf novel (tentatively) called Kismet. I’m excited and a bit nervous about it—I’ve never actually finished a novel before. (Not that there’s any guarantee I’ll finish this one, but I’d like to think this will make it substantially more likely.) I’ll be attending with a friend, Tim Susman, who’s finished a fair number of novels—and who met the workshop’s instructor, Kij Johnson, when she was teaching at the Clarion Workshop he attended a few years ago.

Assuming it goes anywhere I’ll talk more about Kismet later. I’ve realized that since college, though, I’ve been toying around with Big Ideas for stories involving humans and animal-like aliens. That started as a story called “Only With Thine Eyes” that was supposed to turn into a novel (it didn’t, but the story’s collected in Why Coyotes Howl). A later attempt made the aliens into genetically-engineered animal people in a novel called In Our Image that got roughly a third of the way through before collapsing under its own weight. This one… well, it’s not a reincarnation of Image, definitely, although it touches on some similar thematic points.

Meanwhile, I’m working on other various projects, both writing and not-so-writing, as well as engaging in the boring but necessary project of finding more stable employment. I’m in the unenviable yet somewhat amusing position of being in Silicon Valley in the middle of a frenzy for tech developers… and increasingly burned out on the whole endeavor. I don’t want to keep competing with developers who are twenty years younger than I am, better at the kinds of programming brain teasers that interviewers (who are also twenty years younger than I am) seem to love, and perfectly happy with hour-plus commutes (each way). I think I’m trying to aim for a tech writer or developer evangelist type position at this point; failing that I’ll settle for the kind of “boring” corporate programming position that twenty-somethings sneer at but that sound like they might be just fine for me.

Oh: as of this writing there’s still two more days to vote for the Ursa Major Awards!

Ursa Major Final Ballot

I’m very happy to say that Indigo Rain made the Ursa Major ballot this year!

If you haven’t read it, “Indigo Rain” is a novella in FurPlanet’s CupCakes line. It’s got a bit of fantasy, a lot of suspense, and a helping of romance.

Roulette, a young raccoon dancer, dreams of moving to Ranea’s capital city-state and marrying into a better life. But a horrifying encounter plunges her into a momentous political struggle—one that will turn tragically violent unless she and her companions can stop the mysterious Brothers of Atasos. And as if things weren’t complicated enough, Roulette may be falling in love with an activist who’s as far from her dream husband as she could get.

There’s a free two-part preview:

Part 1
Part 2

You can purchase it from several online stores in both print and ebook:

FurPlanet (print)
Bad Dog Books (ebook, DRM-free)
Amazon (print)
Also available from Rabbit Valley, iTunes, and Lulu

And, of course, if you like it, please cast your vote in the Ursas. There’s a lot of other good stuff nominated this year, from several works by Mary (Otters in Space) Lowd to the Hugo-winning Digger omnibus by Ursula Vernon. (The first issue of Claw & Quill was also nominated, which is immensely flattering, but I’d really like to get the damned second issue out. I didn’t know it was going to be a biannual. Mea culpa. As long as it doesn’t turn into a biennial.)

“Indigo Rain” illustrations

The talented Sabretoothed Ermine has put up the cover and one of the three interior illustrations for “Indigo Rain” on her Fur Affinity page.

“Silver Bells at Sunset,” the color cover piece
“Private Dance,” a somewhat racy interior piece

Those pieces not entirely coincidentally illustrate scenes from the two preview bits I’ve published.

Part 1: here FA SF
Part 2: here FA SF

The novella will be available in print from FurPlanet and premiering at Further Confusion 2013.

Further Confusion 2013

So, Further Confusion 2013 has come and gone, and with it a few notable events for me:

The release of “Indigo Rain”
My first reading since Eurofurence 14 (!)
Oh yes, running FurCon’s writing track
A lot of alcohol

Everything seems to have gone really well from those standpoints. It sounds like FurPlanet sold about two dozen copies of “Rain,” which may not sound barn-burning but I’m pretty happy with it. (Look for information about an ebook release, er, eventually. Sooner rather than later. There’s a non-zero chance the ebook will not have Sabretoothed Ermine’s great interior sketches, though.) I got positive feedback on the writing track from both attendees and the con committee. While I didn’t pull the reading off flawlessly—and I’m not likely to be recruited by Audible.com any time soon—overall, it was pretty smooth.

Also, I will probably not be drinking for the next week.

As I mentioned on Twitter, my current job is being phased out, switching from full-time to part-time at the end of the month. (I confess my enthusiasm for the work has already phased out, although the job loss is due to the company’s finances, not my performance.) This may or may not give me more time to work on my personal writing projects like the glacially-developed science fiction novel I’ve been hammering on since roughly 1858, tentatively entitled Kismet, as well as a couple new pieces I’ve been playing around with and the hopefully-soon-reviving Claw & Quill Magazine—but one of my definite goals for 2013 is to get both of those specific projects launched.

I also have a subject I may want to rant about, but I’ll decide later. (In short form, I’m considering how to compare and contrast “giving a small press book a negative review” and “shoving your junk in a light socket and screaming on YouTube for seven minutes.” The differences are subtle, but I think they’re important.)

On reviewing in a small community

So here’s the thing: bad reviews are fun.

Sure, good reviews can be fun, too. But let’s face it—stuff you hate gives you more occasion for zingers. Roger Ebert opened his review of one infamous movie with “Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time.” (My favorite review opener, though, is from Mary Pols of TIME: “More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside.”)

But a good review can’t be just zingers, and the point of a review is not to show off how witty the reviewer is. Ebert explained—without rancor—just what it is that made “Battlefield Earth” suck. He didn’t accuse the movie of being an assault on all that is good and holy; the movie’s creators and stars needed a thick skin to deflect the barbs, but they weren’t personal attacks. No one was writing, say, “This is a steaming pile of shit.”

“That may be vulgar, but it’s not a personal attack.”

Well, see, that’s kinda the heart of the matter.

When you’re just talking trash to your friends about something, you can get away with that defense. In a printed or filmed review, saying that becomes considerably nastier. And if that review isn’t of a movie but is of something that a single person created—like a book—the review is personal, because the work is personal.

I’ve avoided mentioning the reviewer—and specific review—that inspired this, but if I reveal that it’s a furry story, some of you may quickly guess both. When it comes to writers and publishers, this is still a small community. The phrase “steaming pile of shit” comes from that review, as does the assertion that the book under review somehow “tricked” the reviewer into thinking it would be good, except that it really isn’t. It tricked him! Then he recovered from its evil spell and realized it was shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. (I suspect I’m undercounting the number of “shits” he used.)

Without knowing the book in question, the chances are you’re already thinking gosh, even if this is self-published fanfic spewed out by a fever-gripped teenager who left no comma unspliced, you’re making the reviewer sound a little unhinged. Well, he comes across as a little unhinged. To some degree that’s clearly a schtick, but it’s still startlingly vicious.

This is, in fact, a book I saw in draft form. It’s well-written. You could definitely make the case—as the reviewer did, with stentorian profanity—that the protagonist isn’t sympathetic. Neither is the influence character. (He’s charismatic, but not sympathetic.) They’re both con men. They make bad choices. I wanted to slap both of them at multiple points. Some readers might genuinely hate both main characters.

From The Oatmeal

But a badly written book—a “steaming pile of shit,” to wit—would hardly be powerful enough to make anyone angry with it. Whether you like a character or a setting has little to do with the quality of the work. The problem isn’t that this is a negative review. It’s that it’s an unfair review.

I mentioned before that the furry writing community is small, and bluntly, it’s small enough that this edges past merely irritating toward flat-out irresponsible. I doubt it’s going to hurt this particular book’s author, but public viciousness can be genuinely damaging at the scale we’re still at. Also, keep in mind reviewers earn—and lose—reputation currency as well. Authors and publishers do talk. And I can assure you I’m not the only one who’s saying, “Hey, can you believe this guy thinks this is an appropriate way to review a book?”

Let me underline that I’m not suggesting we never say negative things. Furry truly needs good criticism to advance, and we have a history of denying glaring problems in work by our community. But good criticism is well-reasoned. It distinguishes between this has objective problems in its storytelling and this story just isn’t my cup of tea.

And if you really don’t think something has any redeeming value at all—whether it’s competently written but just makes you want to pluck out your eyeballs, or it really is self-published fanfic spewed out by a fever-gripped teenager who left no comma unspliced—then you need to stop and ask yourself what your intention is in reviewing it. I’m betting the honest answer is “I want to mock this so everyone can laugh at my witty zingers, and I can be a capital-P Personality.”

If so, my advice is don’t do it. Because your review will probably be a steaming pile of shit.

(Nothing personal.)

A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood

Some of you might remember this story from, well, a long time ago. A lot of you might not at this point. This wasn’t the first Ranea story but it was the longest one—I think—unmatched until “Indigo Rain,” and for a while was quite popular.

But, as I said: a long time ago. While it’s never been particularly hard to find for those who know where to look, it’s not been very discoverable. I’d started rewriting it in 2010 with the intent of making an expanded version, but never got past about halfway through chapter two. Due to a bit of prodding on unrelated things I decided to simply do a less dramatic revision of the rest and powered through it all today, and, well, here it is.

I’ll be serializing it on the archive sites starting… soon-ish, maybe one chapter every week or two, but for the small in number but high in wisdom group of you reading things over here, you can get it all now—and with somewhat easier to read typesetting and navigation to boot. (Soon I’ll finally start putting stories in the navigation bar of Coyote Prints, too, I suppose…)

A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood

Indigo Rain now an ebook

I’m happy to announce that Indigo Rain is available as an ebook from Bad Dog Books, in both Mobi (Kindle) and EPUB formats. Bad Dog’s ebooks are DRM-free, and Indigo Rain features all three of Sabretoothed Ermine’s interior illustrations.

Indigo Rain product page

It’ll be available through Amazon and other outlets eventually, but for now it’s a Bad Dog exclusive.