Posts Tagged ‘books’

Moving Sucks And Other Banal Observations

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Things have been some­what hec­tic in Casa del Tolbert over the past month.  In late June, we learned that we would not be able to renew the lease on the nice lit­tle house we were rent­ing because the own­ers had decided to put it up for sale.  We scram­bled to pack and find a new place to live.  Luckily, the rental agency we go through had a nice lit­tle condo in the cen­tral part of Fort Collins, a place with cen­tral air, a pri­vate pool and pri­vate lake access.  To adopt the par­lance of the time, it’s pretty swank.  Monday, we drew on the awe­some might of our social net­work and moved house;  three pickup trucks and one A-​​Team van (for serious–it’s painted the same!)  fer­ried our belong­ings from the old and busted to the new hotness.

Moving is prob­a­bly my least favorite life activity–with a caveat that ‘dying’ will prob­a­bly suck more, but I hope not to know for sure for some time yet.  I am always astounded by how much we own when it comes time to pack. I use very lit­tle of my belong­ings on a day to day basis.  I could prob­a­bly sur­vive with only a few changes of clothes, a tooth­brush, a cell phone, and a lap­top to my name.   If I wanted to save a lit­tle more money, I’d prob­a­bly need a microwave and a but­ter knife too.  Everything else seems mostly extra­ne­ous, espe­cially when you’re lug­ging it up a long flight of steps in 90 degree temperatures.

Early on, I man­aged to pawn off half my books and all of my graphic nov­els on Paul and Mo Hummer.  Suckers!  I’m a big con­vert to the Kindle app on my iPad, and real world books seem almost vul­gar to me at this point.  I still have an affec­tion for them, but with space at a pre­mium, my affec­tion only goes so far.  Honestly, if there were some kind of Netflix-​​like ser­vice for ebooks (an ebook lend­ing library? Lendle doesn’t count.), I would make the leap and get rid of every­thing that doesn’t have a strong emo­tional attach­ment (books from my child­hood, signed copies by favorite authors–that sort of thing).

We go through life accret­ing belong­ings like a cad­dis fly larva builds its shell of stream peb­bles.  An inher­ited table here, a box of books there, and the next thing you know, you’re 33 and your belong­ings take 3 trips in 4 dif­fer­ent vehi­cles to move from one space to another.  It feels like only yes­ter­day that I moved every­thing I owned from Lawrence to Grinnell in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee.  Of course, now I’m mar­ried and my belong­ings are really the pos­ses­sions of two peo­ple.  And she’s pretty attached to that table in the same way I’m attached to my signed copy of Perdido Street Station.  What’s a few peb­bles on the back in the name of love?

If I’m lucky and not-​​lazy (fat chance!), we may get every­thing unpacked in time to move again.  Not that I’m plan­ning to do that any time soon.  Three times in four  years is plenty, thank you very much.  But life has a way of zig­ging when you expect a zag.  There’s no sense in fight­ing it unless you enjoy being frustrated.

In that last sen­tence you can see a bit of a shift in my life atti­tude, actu­ally.  Railing against the injus­tices of the world was prac­ti­cally my num­ber one hobby. If “get­ting angry at things you can’t change” were an Olympic sport, I would be on a box of Wheaties in a super­mar­ket near you.  But you can only stay stressed and irri­tated for so long before you finally real­ize that get­ting frus­trated, angry, and so on is often a choice.  You can choose to roll with things as best you can instead.  And it’s the health­ier reac­tion most of the time.  Pick your bat­tles, because your time is lim­ited and nobody has ever said “I wish I had spent more time com­plain­ing about my life” when it enters the final act.

Stop Worrying About Subgenre

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s been an awful lot of chat­ter around the web lately about sub­gen­res and steam­punk in par­tic­u­lar.  We’ve seen attacks on steam­punk, defenses of steam­punk, and a thou­sand shades of opin­ion in-​​between.  As some­one who likes steam/​clockpunk enough to name his busi­ness after it, I have a dog in the fight.

But I’m not drawn to these discussions.

Genre in gen­eral, as far as I am con­cerned, is mostly a con­struct of mar­ket­ing. Booksellers care about them, and the read­ers do too, but I ques­tion how much it helps an author to con­sciously choose a genre or sub­genre.  Right now, I feel bad for any­one writ­ing a steam­punk novel, because steam­punk is clearly, at least to my eyes, reach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point rivaled only by zom­bies.  To be on that bus, you needed to write and sell your steam­punk novel 2–3 years ago.  I’m sure we’re going to con­tinue to see nov­els from estab­lished authors in this vein, but it wouldn’t sur­prise me if edi­tors and agents are already mov­ing on in their search for the next big thing.

My advice to you, and to myself, is to ignore the sub­genre when you write.  You can ignore that advice and still be suc­cess­ful (of course). I know, for exam­ple, that John Scalzi set out delib­er­ately to write mil­i­tary SF because it seemed to be sell­ing well, but I won­der what we would have got­ten from him if he had set out to write his own sub­genre.  Scalzian fic­tion, we would call it, prob­a­bly.  What would it look like? Who knows.  It’d prob­a­bly have fart jokes though! (and I mean that in a pos­i­tive way)

That’s not to say that if your pas­sion is steam­punk, I think you shouldn’t write a steam­punk novel. By all means, punk away.  This post once again boils down to “don’t lis­ten to oth­ers and write what you love.”

But I think this advice espe­cially holds true when it comes to labels.  Labels are for mar­ket­ing and that comes later.  Right now, when you’re still string­ing words together and shap­ing a book just seems like the wrong time to get caught up in such thoughts.  It’s not the sub­gen­res that exist today that get me excited.  I’m exited to won­der just what weird, wild, and expres­sive forms and gen­res writ­ers are work­ing on right now, as we speak, that we’ve never seen before.  I can’t wait to see what they turn out to be.  Regardless of where they are shelved in the bookstore.

Charlie Finlay Gives Away Books (with a catch)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Charlie Finlay is a great writer who taught me a ton about writ­ing back when I didn’t really deserve it.   He has a new fan­tasy book series launch­ing, set dur­ing the Revolutionary War, and the first book is called Patriot Witch.   I have really been look­ing for­ward to this.  Historical fan­tasy set in this time period is rare as far as I know, and cou­pling the period with a writer like Finlay is going to be a treat.

CCfinlay: You Say You Want A Revolution?

But what I really wanted to point out to you today was this inter­est­ing strat­egy he’s using to build buzz for the book.  He’s giv­ing out free early copies for the book, so long as you go and post a review on one of the mer­chant sites.  Then he’ll send you an advance copy of the next book, so long as you do the same. I sus­pect he is going to chain peo­ple all the way through the series this way.

I think it’s a clever way to get some men­tions out there. If I were him, I would have asked for blog posts as well, for read­ers with blogs, but maybe Amazon​.com reviews will have more of an impact on sales.  I’m not sure.

Charlie, like most newer nov­el­ists, has not much of a mar­ket­ing bud­get behind his book.  These days, mar­ket­ing falls on the shoul­ders of the writer more and more.  I col­lect strate­gies like these to offer to my clients as part of my web design series.  I’ll be watch­ing this one to see where it goes.

I wish I had time to take him up on the offer, but things are get­ting really hec­tic around here between look­ing for a job, free­lance, and Escape Pod.  And I’m also writ­ing again a bit.  Not enough time in the day, damn it.

Book 2009 #3: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I can’t help but think this book would have had a big­ger impact on me if I had read it before Obama was elected.  It’s a great overblown rant against all the hor­ri­ble things DHS has done in the name of pro­tect­ing us.  It’s a decently writ­ten book with mod­er­ately inter­est­ing geek char­ac­ters fight­ing the good fight and using wire­less to do it (sound­ing sus­pi­ciously famil­iar?).  So Cory’s hot­but­ton issues show more than a lot of other writers–I don’t really mind because I share most of those inter­ests myself.  I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I liked it quite a bit, but the res­o­lu­tion is what even­tu­ally made me put it in the “not sure” pile.  I’m going behind a cut to talk about more in case you don’t want the end­ing spoiled. Continue read­ing ›

Book 2009 #2: The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been aware of Mike Carey for some time now, as the writer of a good run on the Hellblazer comic (which you prob­a­bly only know of as that abor­tion of a movie Constantine) as well as the writer of Lucifer (which I wasn’t a big fan of.  Nothing wrong with it really, just not my bag).  As far as I know, this is Carey’s first novel, and it’s a very good one.

Felix Castor is an exor­cist liv­ing in London.  In his world, it’s just some­thing you’re born to do, or not.  And he was born with the capac­ity.  Felix has some friends, some bad his­tory, and no money.  Sound famil­iar?  Felix is your arche­typ­i­cal down-​​on-​​his luck pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, only he gets rid of ghosts instead of solve mys­ter­ies.  At least at first, but even­tu­ally you know he’s gonna solve a mys­tery.  And he does, and it’s quite satisfying.

I often gripe about the mem­o­ra­bil­ity of SF/​F char­ac­ters by chal­leng­ing peo­ple to name ten mem­o­rable SF/​F char­ac­ters by name.  Then I ask them to name ten char­ac­ters from the works fo Charles Dickens.  It’s an exercise–in what, I’m not sure, and I’m pretty sure John Joseph Adams put me onto it.  In any case, Felix Castor has an inter­est­ing name, so he’s got one foot out of the “for­get­table char­ac­ters” grave already.  Through the course of the book, you come to like this schmuck.  He means well. He screws up a lot, he gets the everlov­ing shit beaten out of him (then he gets laid–the gumshoe karmic bal­ance restored), and even­tu­ally he solves the mys­tery and every­one is happy.  Sort of.

If you like hard­boiled detec­tive sto­ries, then you will like The Devil You Know.  If you like super­nat­ural thrillers that don’t nec­es­sar­ily involve peppy blonde women with super­nat­ural tat­toos on their lower backs (per­fect for the book cover), then you’ll prob­a­bly like this as well.  It’s out in paper­back, and a sec­ond book in the series is cur­rently out in hard­back. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make the wait.

Some Recent Reading: Michael Chabon and Adam-​​Troy Castro

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I thor­oughly enjoyedThe Yiddish Policeman’s Union .  The com­bi­na­tion of alt-​​history, exotic-​​to-​​me jew­ish and Alaskan cul­ture, and noir detec­tive thriller was just the kind of thing I needed to read right now.   But more than the con­cept, I was engaged by the char­ac­ters of Landsman and Berko Schemets.   Science fic­tion has been accused of not hav­ing mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, and I sup­port that opin­ion.  I can name the num­ber of mem­o­rable SF/​F char­ac­ters on one two hands.  It takes both my hands and feet just to name the mem­o­rable char­ac­ters from Dickens.  There’s a def­i­nite dif­fer­ence there. For the strong char­ac­ters alone, I’m inclined to say this is more lit fic than sci fic.

The sec­ond book I read in October was Emmissaries for the Dead by Adam-​​Troy Castro.  This was a free­bie at WorldCon, snatched up at the same party I got the Chabon book.  I for­get the pub­lisher hold­ing that party, but I owe JJA for get­ting me in.  It was the best event I attended at the con, and not just because I got eight books out of it.  I had some nice con­ver­sa­tions with some really sharp people.

As to the book itself, it was trans­par­ent to me that this is a fresh­man out­ing.  I’ve been read­ing Castro’s short fic­tion for some time, but I don’t think he has found his foot­ing in the novel realm yet.  I picked this one up because it too had a noir murder-​​mystery pitch on the back cover, but with the added appeal of a strange con­structed ecosys­tem with sen­suwunda appeal.  Unfortunately, the narrator’s per­son­al­ity grated on me.  Andrea Cort, but I don’t know that I will remem­ber her six months from now. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this book because I would rather you read some of it your­self and decide whether it’s for you than go on my opin­ion.  It undoubt­edly suf­fers from fol­low­ing so closely my read­ing of the Chabon, which is a lit­tle unfair.  But I fin­ished it, which is more than I can say about the last half-​​dozen SF nov­els I’ve tried to read.

Awesome Little Brother Alternative Cover Design

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The New Sleekness » Little Brother, in progress

Tor designer Pablo Defendini has, in his spare time, done up an alter­na­tive cover to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which I hope to get­ting around to read­ing some­time this decade). I really love the approach of this cover design, and from what I’ve read about the book any­way, it seems really appro­pri­ate. The addi­tion of easter eggs means after read­ing the book, you have a new­found appre­ci­a­tion to it.  I like the illus­tra­tor style–it’s not some­thing you see in SF book cov­ers very often, so I think this book would stand out if I saw it on the shelf.  The typog­ra­phy is tight, well done, and going with the Neil Gaiman quote promi­nently like that is a damned good deci­sion that will help sell the book.

I’m adding this site to my feeds. I’m more inter­ested in cover design lately, and I think his work is par­tic­u­larly inspiring.

Here’s a pro­gres­sion of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what hap­pens when I have a week­end to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, par­tic­u­larly includ­ing lit­tle easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a trans­la­tor; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.)