Scott Pearson's Blog, page 7

Live Journal spam

I've got a few friends that read my blog on LJ although they don't use it themselves, and for them I've left my settings so that nonregistered people can leave comments. Due to the steadily increasing amount of anonymous spam posts, however, I've had to change my privacy settings so only registered LJ users can post. Sorry.

Going forward you guys, and you know who you are, will have to track down my blog on the other sites where it's hosted to comment. If you can't find it, drop me an email.

Shore Leave

After too long an absence from posting while breathing deeply of the existential malaise emanating from the publishing industry (and please check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch's fabulous blog on the subject), I'm back with fun news. It's that special time of year known as Shore Leave!

I can't overemphasize the importance of this convention to me. I first attended in 2006 with my second inclusion in the contest anthology Strange New Worlds. Still feeling rather fannish, I was nervous to be hanging out with writers like Greg Cox and Margaret Wander Bonanno. But over the years I've gotten to know a lot of the Trek writers, and they're now friends and peers, people I stay in touch with year around via email, Facebook, and other various internet connections. In addition to gaining friends, getting to know people like Marco Palmieri, formerly the head of the Trek line at Simon & Schuster, also helped my career along as I sold a short story and then a novella thanks to Marco's invitations to pitch. I look forward to Shore Leave for the chance to see the gang in person and to interact with all the great fans.

This year I'll be taking part in five events. Friday night I'll be an usher at the big celebrity roast of the fabulously nice Bob Greenberger. Following that is the annual Meet the Pros autographing session, where I'll finally be signing copies of Myriad Universes: Shattered Light, containing my novella Honor in the Night. Saturday at 1 I'll be in Salon A for the Star Trek Magazine panel, led by the magazine's editor, Paul Simpson. I've had several articles published in the magazine. Later in the afternoon, at 4 in the Belmont Room, I'll be on the Myriad Universes panel, with a smattering of authors who've been included in the three volumes of the series. On Sunday at 11 in Salon F I'll be part of the Making of a Reboot panel, led by Kevin Dilmore, as we make the case for what TV show we'd each like to reboot and how we'd approach it. I'm rebooting the classic British series UFO.

I hope to see you there!

How I Became a Wine Lover by Drinking Tea and Watching The Godfather

I didn't drink alcohol until I was in my midthirties. Didn't have any ethical issue about it, I just never liked the taste of alcohol and didn't see any need to force past that. In high school and college, watching friends occasionally partake of the excess of youth, drinking far too much and doing stupid things combined with vomiting, the appeal of drinking was lost on me.

Nevertheless, in my thirties I found myself growing more and more curious about wine. Some close friends were serious wine drinkers, talking the talk of nose and finish and mouthfeel and all the other esoterica that's so easy to make fun of. I just didn't get it, but it intrigued me.

Now let's back up a few decades. I've always been a tea drinker. In my youth I wasn't fanatic about it, but I enjoyed having a cuppa with my grandma. In college, when I spent a school year in England, my fondness for tea served me well. I drank tea a few times a day. After coming back to the States, I still had a cup now and then, but it wasn't a huge habit.

Things started coming together about thirteen years ago. We moved into our new house and there was a tea shop in the neighborhood called TeaSource. I walked in and started chatting with Bill, the owner. In five minutes I learned more about tea than I had known in my entire life. He explained to me that there's basically only one tea plant and all the varieties come from different aging and processing of the tea, as well as environmental differences that affect the taste depending on where the tea is grown. Because of that last fact, teas are often named after the region they come from, because their environment produces distinct qualities.

A light went on. "Wait, that's like wine," I said. From my friends, the wine drinkers, I'd learned that although there are more distinct varieties of grapes, the environment they're grown is very important, and many wines are named after the regions they're from. Suddenly I got something about wine that had always alluded me. It's easy to be amused by fancypants wine talk, but simple old tea had allowed me to make a connection I could relate to.

I was a stay-at-home dad, so I put baby Ella in her stroller and went to the TeaSource almost daily. As I tried more and more teas and developed my palate, I understood more about the subtleties one can taste with some effort and practice. My wine curiosity grew. Then, a couple years later, when Ella was old enough that Sandra and I could take a short vacation without her, we went to San Francisco.

Enter The Godfather. As Francis Ford Coppola fans, we couldn't be in San Francisco without eating at his restaurant. And there on the menu was a taster's special for his wines. Four small pours of different wines, and you got to keep the glass. Seemed like it had to be done. As a neophyte, by the time I got to the Zinfandel, I was a bit overwhelmed. The zin just about knocked me out of my chair. So strong, so spicy. But when we got back home and told our wine-drinking friends, there was no looking back.

I quickly gravitated to cabs and zins, the strong stuff that knocked me for a loop at Coppola's restaurant. It was a source of amusement to all my friends who'd known me as a nondrinker forever. And, with no tolerance, I felt silly in the melon after half a glass of high-alcohol zin. I discovered the appeal of a mild "social buzz" that was not taken to the regurgitating end that teenagers often do. But I do love the taste of wine.

Which brings us to the present. I have a wine fridge to keep my favorite reds in the low sixties, the proper serving temperature. I talk the wine talk some times, but still find it a bit silly. And that's how I became a wine lover by drinking tea and watching The Godfather.

We Interrupt This Blog for a Public Service Announcement

This is a PSA for backing up your computer files. We all know we should. Many of us don't. Maybe we have great plans for it, get started at it, then fall away.

I was in that last category back in January when my computer started coughing up blood, fell on its face, convulsed for a while, then got frightfully still. Flat line. I started looking at my backup discs and realized that they were not weeks behind, or months behind, but years behind. I could have sworn I had done it a month or so ago. Yikes.

The happy ending, as previously blogged here, was that all my data was recovered. The loss of photos and writing projects would have been devastating, and the fear I lived under until I had all those back was terrible. I vowed that I had learned my lesson. My immediate action was to get a terabyte external drive to go along with my new computer. That drive, using Apple's fancypants Time Machine software, is an automated backup system that records my changes hourly. If something goes horrible wrong on my computer now, I've got that drive write there ready to restore my precious files.

But what if a zombie comes into my house and destroys my entire desk? That drive sits right next to the computer. One zombie, or Hellfire missile from an errant Predator drone, would take out my backup along with my computer. Obviously, I hadn't gotten serious enough.

Yesterday I signed up with on offsite storage service. All my personally created files are uploaded, encrypted, and stored on servers. Their software automatically detects changes--just like Time Machine--and uploads new or updated files. Now if the Blob crashes to Earth in my neighborhood and engulfs and devours my desk, I know that I can buy a new computer, log into my offsite storage, and start downloading.

I'd been thinking about doing the offsite thing since the computer crashed, but over the weekend when a Facebook friend posted that her computer had died and she may have lost an entire novel she had written, I decided it was high time I finally did so. Got the upload started Sunday morning. It may actually take over a week to upload over 40 gigs of files, but I'll sleep better when I'm away from home.

Because when you're gone, extraterrestrial bounty hunters often use your home for stakeouts, and they're none too careful with your personal belongings, I can tell you.

 

In for the Long Haul . . . Just Didn't Realize How Looooooonnnnnnng

I date my wanting-to-be-a-writer revelation to 1977 when I was in seventh grade. If memory serves (and it may not) that was the year I had a writing assignment on what I wanted to be. I wrote two papers, actually, one on being a veterinarian and one on being a writer. This was because, being a writer-type, I was already heavily neurotic and/or without esteem and just couldn't bring myself to get up in front of my classmates and say I wanted to be a writer. I read my paper on being a vet. But I knew I was lying. Of course, that's what being a writer is all about . . . making stuff up.

I started submitting stories that year. Everything I wrote got submitted. Those early, didn't know what I was doing, outlandishly plotted, cliché-ridden stories all went out. And all came back. I kept at it. In 1987, following graduating from college during which I actually learned how to write, I scored my first professional publication. It had taken ten years, but I said to myself, well, got that first sale, that's the hard one, now things are going to get easy. I'll pause a moment to let the laughter die down.

I was back to the submission/rejection routine again. Had a smattering of poems and short stories published over the next several years, but it was 1996 before I got a substantial pay check again. And it was still pretty small. I struggled on. In the late 1990s I'd been at the writing thing for twenty years without much to show for it. I decided to take a break from submitting. I still dabbled in writing, but skipped being rejected. But I did keep writing one Star Trek story a year for the Strange New Worlds contest, which finally paid off in 2004. It had taken nearly thirty years, but I said to myself, well, got that first national sale with a major publisher, that's the hard one, now things are going to get easy. I'll pause a moment to let the laughter die down.

Had a second Strange New Worlds story in 2006. That time it had taken only two years between good bits. I said to myself . . . well, you get the picture. Got a third Star Trek story published in 2007. Okay, just one year. Got into a couple small press anthologies, started writing for Star Trek Magazine, things were picking up. Then it took until 2010 to get my first novella published, a three-year gap. Not that I wasn't excited, and not that I don't recognize that a lot of writers don't get that far. But, still, thirty-three years from revelation to novel. I really need to pick up the pace. It would be nice to publish a full-length original novel while I'm still capable of holding up the book and reading it myself.

Started writing a story for a small press anthology the other day, and got a new idea for an urban fantasy novel last week. Time to get cracking!

 

Writing Every Day . . . Or Not, As the Case May Be

"Remember, a writer writes, always." Wise words spoken by Larry, Billy Crystal's character in Throw Momma from the Train, the most realistic movie about writing ever. Well, maybe not the part about Hitchcockian swapping of murders. But the shot of Larry sitting at the typewriter (remember them?) trying to write but being distracted, cleaning his typewriter, playing with Scotch tape on his face . . . that was so true to life.

Several months ago I came up with a scheme for writing every day. It's so hard to make the time, juggling day job and familial duties, and trying to focus on writing something on spec when you have no guarantee that you'll be able to sell it, and there's the fish tank needing cleaning and the lawn needing mowing and blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes.

So I decided I would write during my bus ride to work. A half an hour in the morning, possibly another half hour in the afternoon, though I usually read on the ride home. I bought some fabulous Moleskine notebooks and felt quite writerly as I scratched away every morning. It was productive, and I turned out stories and notes for novels. One story I wrote on the bus was sold to Space and Time and should be out later this year.

But there was a problem. I was, obviously, writing in long hand. So then I needed to find the time to key enter all those pages into the computer. Having been written on the bus, they're sometimes hard to read, and I'm back to the same old problem of finding the time to get at the computer. Granted, I do revise as I go, but I also can't help feeling like it would have been better if I had just found a half hour to write directly on the computer. Although the shortest story was typed in quickly and sold, I have a longer piece that I never finished writing and is now taking me forever to type up.

You'll notice I said I never finished writing one of the pieces. After getting further and further behind on the key entry, and taking on a gig writing book reviews for Suspense Magazine, I decided to stop writing on the bus and get in the extra reading time. I've been working on getting the unfinished story entered, but it will be awhile before I get to the point where I get to start writing the closing scenes for the first time. After finishing this blog, I'm going to do some more typing on it. It's a follow up to the story I had published in the anthology Space Grunts, and it contains what I think is the most heart-wrenching scene I've ever written. So I've got to get at it and get it out there.

Remember, a writer writes, always.

Osama bin Laden, Dead

What a night here in the Enemy Lines compound. Spent most of the weekend working on my latest article for Star Trek Magazine, finally sending it in to my editor, Paul "Oi, you!" Simpson, around 6 p.m. Sunday evening. "Finally my weekend can start," I joked. After dinner, watching some TV with the family, and cleaning up the kitchen, I sat back down at the keyboard with a sudden clear plan for a writing project. A little bit into that research it was no longer so clear that this was the project to turn my career around, so I caught up on Facebook for a bit, then realized I hadn't yet posted a new blog, something I've vowed to do at least once a week and the deadline had arrived. 

I stared at the blank page for a little while, coming up empty. Then, out of nowhere, I remembered something about the Trek article, looked back through my email, and confirmed it: I'd written the article to the wrong specs. My piece was a few hundred words over. I start slicing and dicing the piece, then hear the ding of incoming mail. It was an update from Truthout: bin Laden dead, Obama to address nation soon. I clicked the link and kept working on the article until the feed went live, and watched the president's announcement.

The sense of relief or joy or closure I would have expected upon finally hearing the news of the end of this loathsome person didn't materialize. I found myself thinking instead of al Qaeda reprisals, of the never-ending conflicts in the world, of the religious hysteria so often mixed in. But I also had to keep working on my article, because a deadline's a deadline.

After finishing the condensed version and sending it off to Paul, I popped back onto Facebook to see comments from friends across the country. One person had posted a picture showing the Statue of Liberty holding the severed head of bin Laden. I found it grotesque on a variety of levels. The beheadings of Americans by Islamic extremists over the last several years has been reprehensible, and buying into that mentality and attaching it to a symbol of liberty . . . that's just wrong-headed to my way of thinking.

Watching CNN video feeds from New York, of crowds gathering at Ground Zero, I find myself thinking of my NYC friends, hoping that somehow they will sleep better tonight.

The Casual Piracy of the Internet: Stealing is Stealing

Not long after my Star Trek novella came out I discovered a pirated file of the anthology online while searching for reviews. I posted about it on Trek BBS, a very popular message board for Trek fans and writers. I was surprised at some of the responses, that people thought my anger was a waste, that fighting piracy is foolish, that it was all tilting at windmills. I fully admit that fighting internet-based piracy of files is like trying to keep dandelions out of your yard, but, come on, these people are stealing pure and simple. Sure, I'm not going to lose sleep over it, but I'm also not going to let it pass without comment. I reported it to Simon & Schuster, and the file was taken down. Of course, it popped up in other places, which I haven't gotten around to reporting yet.

A big part of the problem seems to be that people don't regard this as really stealing. I'm not sure how they arrive at this notion. Clearly they know that this is something that's for sale by the people who actually own it, and anytime you snag something for free without the permission of the people legitimately selling it, well, that's what stealing is, isn't it?

And this is how I make my living, after all. At my day job I edit other people's writing, and then in my off hours I write my own fiction. Anyone who creates something should be able to sell it, right? Just because it's in a form that can be electronically distributed doesn't make it fair game; whether I build a cabinet or write a story, it's something I've made and if you take it without my permission and deny me the ability to profit from my work, you are ripping me off and messing with my job security. That's pretty low behavior and criminal to boot. It's still shoplifting, just as much as if you'd walked into a bookstore and stolen a book off the shelf.

Another weird thing about it is the comments posted on the sites that provide the links to the pirated copies. The people are really excited about getting the stuff, they mention how much they love Star Trek and reading the stories. Well, dudes, show some love for the writer, don't rip him off. If you appreciate all the hard work someone put into crafting a story that's going to entertain you, then support the writer by buying the work. It's like stealing food from your favorite restaurant to rave about Trek and then steal all the books.

So, blah, blah, blah, it's the same old story, but I'm going to bring it up now and again because maybe, just maybe, I might change the mind of a person who's on the fence about the subject. And I have got to dig up those new dandelions . . .

Warning: Liberal Political Rant to Follow

I fully admit that raising the taxes of the rich will not singlehandedly cure our budget woes. Now I expect in return that conservatives will fully admit that cutting the taxes of the rich will not inherently help our budget woes.  I'll wait. Still waiting. Man, it's quiet.

I've encountered conservatives ridiculing liberals as ignorant for thinking raising taxes on the rich will help at all. Then those same conservatives just turn around and recite their own ideological mantra about cutting taxes, because that works "every time" they say.

Really? Every time? Under every circumstance? Always? Maybe on the planet Unicornia where money is magic jelly beans. Sure, under the right circumstances, cutting taxes will lead to investment and jobs, and that growth creates new revenue streams that not only cover the initial tax break but exceed it. Cutting taxes can increase tax revenue. In theory.

But let's look at the real world, the one that exists outside the ghost of Ronald Reagan: a world where U.S. corporations out-source their production to foreign countries with cheap labor while stashing piles of cash in offshore accounts beyond U.S. tax laws. How many well-paying jobs in our own country are going to be created by further cutting taxes on the rich? How much of that tax-cut money will actually stay in the U.S.?

I don't know. And neither do the people who are blindly reciting the "cut taxes on the rich" trope. Don't try to act like financial wizards when you're just saying the same thing you always say. Our troubles are complex, and parroting one-size-fits-all ideologiy is not what we need to solve them. It was letting the rich do whatever they wanted to try to get even richer that drove our car off the cliff in the first place. 

We need considered, nuanced responses to our problems. Ideas, not ideologies. Problem is the entire political process is so compromised by money that I don't know who could come up with sensible answers, much less how they could then actually put a plan in motion.

The Scarlet W: On Being a Writer in the End Times

I picked a great time to have my writing career briefly regain consciousness, didn't I? The acquisition of Honor in the Night, my Star Trek novella, back in 2008 seemed to roughly coincide with the beginning of the end of traditional publishing. As blogged elsewhere, the novella had a bumpy road to print, but it's out there now, and doing fairly well. But the options for what I should do next are either wide open or bleak, depending on how you look at it. Michael Stackpole has been blogging about the state of the industry lately on his website, and every writer should check it out.

As traditional print publishing staggers around in the new world of e-books, established writers can more easily just take their brand straight to their readers. Writers like me, on the other hand, will find themselves drowning in the deluge of print that the internet sprays everywhere like an ill-mannered lawn sprinkler. I don't have a brand yet, and could use the structure of traditional publishing to help me make one. But those traditions, along with bookstores, are in transition, everyone is a little in the dark, and the flashlight batteries are a bit low. Publishers are shaking the lights, smacking them on the palm of their hands, hoping to coax just a little more illumination out of them.

Late last year, as Honor in the Night finally hit bookstores, I decided, during a flash of insight, that one of the main differences between me and successful, published novelists was that I didn't have another novel to sell. I know, a bit of an intuitive leap, perhaps, but it was one of those moments where one stands on a windswept promontory, long coat flapping, hair dripping from the rain, shakes one fist at the dark sky as it is rent by lightning, and shouts, "In 2011 I will write a novel, dammit!" as the waves break loudly far below. The January 2001 issue of Writer's Digest arrived shortly afterward (in fact, I think I was still trying to dry my long coat) and the cover proclaimed, "Write Your Novel in 2011."

It was one of those if-I-were-a-superstitious-man moments . . . but I'm not. Still, I took it as encouragement. I will do this, I mumbled to myself as I blew my nose. Turns out standing on a promontory in a rainstorm in the dead of night can give you quite a sniffle. But then my desktop computer died, running many projects off the rails before I got a new computer and got everything back to what passes for normal during my non-fist-shaking moments. Perhaps this is a good time to mention as an aside that the fabulous Pete Hautman (if you don't know his work, do yourself a favor and grab some) once told me he pictured me as an old man standing in my yard shaking my fist and yelling, "Sons of bitches!" 

Which brings us to April, mid-April at that. I currently have a freelance copyediting job for my friend Tony Dierckins, another freelance copyediting gig for a new self-publishing author, reviews due each month for Author Magazine and Suspense Magazine, and an article due for Star Trek Magazine. How's my novel coming along? I think I've got about five hundred words. Ouch. I do have notes. A working title. The opening scene. I have also written a bit of the final scene, so I know how it ends. I think I know enough about what happens in the middle that I really do have a novel that could be written.

Now I just need to write the thing and hope some sort of publishing industry still exists when I'm done and that the aforementioned industry will be interested in the manuscript. If not . . . I guess I can put out an e-book. You might have heard of them. All the kids are talking about them.