Some random thoughts:

Over at SF Signal, one of the commenters on the Mind Meld I participated in yesterday noted that most of the people giving examples were white men, and most of the examples they gave were the works of white men. Putting aside the fact that we don’t know how many women or other ethnicities were invited to participate and perhaps did not respond, I always find these kinds of examinations interesting. In the same way, I sometimes notice halfway through a movie that every single character in the film is white, or black, and from that moment on I’m more obsessed by the monochrome nature of the film than anything else.

Personally I don’t think I’m a sexist, but perhaps I am and don’t realize it. We all think we’re wonderful people, when in fact most of us are complete kneebiters. But that’s beside the point.

The question was to give an example of SF/F worldbuilding that I thought was genius, and I used Pohl’s Heechee books as my choice. I could have used Julian May’s Pliocene/Milieu books as my example; it’s just that as I scanned my bookshelf I happened to notice Pohl’s books first and thought damn, Pohl’s worldbuilding was fantastic and I fired off my response. If I’d glanced at a different shelf, I might have added one more woman to the list.

This makes me think about women writers I would give a limb to be in the same writing class as. Aside from May, there are plenty of female writers from various genres who have rocked my socks off, and continue to do so – like Barbara Tuchman, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith (perhaps my favorite non SF/F writer currently), or Dorothy Sayers. Of course, anyone who reads should be able to produce a lengthy list of authors of various genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religious affiliations, without trying too hard. If you can’t, you’re probably just not reading enough.

I’ve been trying to learn how to play guitar and speak French. For several years now. I don’t learn easy. Part of this is a stubborn determination to regard human interaction as undesirable, meaning I disdain teachers and tutors and try to do these things by myself, with fairly predictable results. A year ago The Duchess, my suffering wife, bought me some guitar lessons at a local place and marched me over there so she wouldn’t have to listen to my self-invented “chords” and I have to admit I like the teacher and have made astounding progress. I’m no Clapton or Van Halen, but at least I can play something identifiable as a “song”. And I now know what a Power Chord is! and why everyone lurves power chords.

French: Not so much. I’ve been striving to learn merely to speak broken, pidgen French using various audio recording-typ lessons, and while I think I might be able to painfully mumble something a generous and helpful Parisian might be able to understand, I don’t feel very masterful. We’ll see how it goes.

Aside from all that, revisions on The Eternal Prison continue apace, with some surprisingly hefty changes. This happens to me a lot; a minor suggestion or criticism inspires a lot of writing, because I suddenly see how things could be oh so much better, and I’m off to the races. I like what I’m doing, ripping and tearing things apart and pasting them back together. Hopefully my editor will, too.

I am baked to a nice red color after my Book Roast. There was pantslessness, whiskey, and thong underwear, and someone did indeed win a signed copy of The Digital Plague. Truly, a great time to be alive.

Thanks to all the Book Roast folks for a grand time, and I’d encourage everyone to check it out on a regular basis for some book-based fun.

I almost forgot about this: A few months ago, when brainstorming how to get folks to pay attention to me (anything short of Daffy Duck’s Trick You Can Perform Only Once is fair game – nudity is fine), I made a little video “trailer” for The Digital Plague. No! Really! Using an array of public-domain stuff, I created a short clip to promote the book.

Then, what happened is, I was in a bar with a bunch of folks from IO9.com and chatting with Annalee Newitz (much to her dismay, no doubt) and mentioned trailers for books, planning to wow her with the fact that I had, indeed, created such a trailer. before I could brag, however, she made a sour face and said that a trailer for a book is possibly the silliest thing she’d ever heard of. This isn’t a quote, since I didn’t take notes, was somewhat drunk, and have a poor memory anyway–it is entirely possible she said something completely different, and I am just remembering it wrong. I also remember wearing a tuxedo and fencing with a large green rat in a purple smoking jacket. It’s tough being inebriated all the time.

Anyway, after having my hopes and dreams of easy promotion crushed right in front of me, I forgot all about the video for a while. Until today, in fact, when, in a brief and shining moment of sobriety, I remembered it. So here it is. Be kind. I bruise easily.

Consider here this lovely photo sent to me by one Tez Miller from Australia. I’ve always known that cats are the smartest creatures on the Earth (exceeding Dolphins, humans, and even white mice), but here is proof! Tez added this along with the pic: “A photo of my cat Manny with The Digital Plague. Sorry he doesn’t look more enthused – he had to visit the vet today.”

Don’t fret, if you read Tez’s blog you’ll see Manny is fine. Although I think the caption to this photo should be DUBIOUS CAT IZ DUBIOUS ABOUT YER BOOK.

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Well, a day late, but what can you do. My general incompetence is always leaking all over my life, ruining everything. I’ve got nothing coherent to say, but a few random things are bumping about, so I figure I’ll make use of them and just jot them here.

I keep pretty good track of my writing projects and how they fare, especially the short stories. I submit stories pretty regularly, far and wide. So far, over the course of my entire ‘professional’ career (since I was about 18), I’ve submitted 1120 stories to various markets, and sold a grand total of 24 (sold being a loose term - accepted might be more accurate, as many, especially in the early going, were sold for contrib copies or similar). This is a success rate of 2.1% for those keeping score at home. On the one hand, this is a pretty sucky percentage. On the other, this reflects the relative lack of due diligence I perform when researching markets – I’d guess a good 20% of my submissions are doomed from the beginning because I am too lazy to research markets properly.

My success rate with novels, on the other hand, is great: Out of 8 novels that I’ve attempted in some way to sell, I’ve sold 4, for a success rate of 50%. Out of the 4 that haven’t sold, one is still being actively shopped, so there’s always hope.

Other randomness:  I just finished playing the game Portal, which was a blast. I don’t play many video games; basically I am a whore for First Person Shooter-type games and that’s about it, unless you count Text Adventures. I played a mean Zork when I was a nerdy kid as opposed to a nerdy adult. Portal is a lot of fun, and I recommend it not merely as a cool FPS game, but as a puzzle-game – the whole game is about solving puzzles, really, and you never once hold an actual gun or kill another being in the game. Well, almost never. Depends on definitions, I suppose. Still, a fun game.

I’ve also been hearing a bit about MagCloud, which is interesting to me as a DIY publisher of a zine. MagCloud is kind of like Lulu.com for magazines – they let you upload a PDF for free and claim they will handle subscription fulfilment and manufacturing, with a base cost of 20 cents a page. You can set the cover price and keep the difference, so if you’re mag costs $5 you can set the price at $6 and keep the dollar. A nifty idea, especially if they really do handle fulfilment for you. . .except, sweet jebus, twenty cents a page? My fucking god. It sounds okay at first, because twenty cents doesn’t sound like much scratch, but my little zine right now costs between two and three cents a page to produce. Granted, I am manufacturing them myself and handling fulfilment myself, but still. If MagCloud cost five cents a page, I could see it as an alternative, but this shit is bananas. An issue of my zine would have to cost $12, and that’s without me making a dime from it.

Sure, if you want to do a small 10-page kind of thing, it might be do-able, especially considering the zero startup cost. But for anything else, not workable. Unless you want to be in the same boat as folks who put their books out through Publish America, where their books cost three million dollars each and they wonder why no one will take a chance and buy one.

So that’s what’s bouncing around in my head. That and drink recipes. And my complete inability to play my guitar in time. And the fact that it’s been raining in Hoboken for about sixteen years straight.