Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I just finished up a great novel workshop with Dean Smith and a handful of other writers in Lincoln City, Oregon. There was a lot of good interaction and hammering on submission packages for our recently-completed novels. My package is now eagerly on its way to the hands of an editor who (I hope) will be eager to see the whole thing.

Yesterday, at the end of the workshop, Dean gave us all a little advice on dealing with inevitable piracy — folks posting our work on the web without our permission. I won’t go into details, it was mostly commonse sense given the realities of the world.

But imagine my surprise when, doing a casual out-of-curiosity search on a couple of key phrases today, I found that a website has already posted a complete (but shoddy) copy of my first Analog story. Shoddy in two senses: they got the byline wrong (they left out my first name) and they changed some typography that was important to the plot and the humor in the original story. The really weird thing is that, given the nature of the rest of the site, it makes no sense at all for them to have posted an SF story — or any fiction — in the first place.

Anyway, I won’t get my knickers in a knot over it. I might not even have minded if they’d got my name right — but please don’t take that as permission to post an author’s stuff without asking.

The server hosting this website seems to have been having unsuspected problems for the past few days. After a reboot, a restore, and some tinkering it seems all right now, but some of the recent posts are temporarily missing in action — I restored an older backup of the database until I can figure out just what happened.

No deathless prose was lost (of course not, it wouldn’t be deathless then, would it?) and I’ll back and fill soon. However, “soon” won’t be for about a week since I’ll be heavily involved in a novel workshop (led by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch) in Oregon for the next several days.

On a lighter note, yesterday I got a rewrite request from Stan Schmidt at Analog for a story I submitted a while back. Not a sale yet, but likely to be one after I turn in the revision (mostly trimming it to fit the Probability Zero format).

Just a quick note. I’ve uploaded my Footprints story “Snowball” as a PDF but I’m not happy with the formatting, so I’m going to tweak it a bit before publishing the link. I’ll be doing the same with “The Gremlin Gambit”. That last is still available in HTML from MindFlights’ archive.

If I haven’t gotten to this by the weekend, remind me.

Update 4/10/10: These are now available from my Stories page.

Internet shadows, that is, as in a dark network.

My web servers suffered a prolonged network outage because of (a) a change Qwest made that messed up the DSL line, and (b) my old ISP being totally non-responsive so I couldn’t get them to work with Qwest to fix the problem. I ended up changing ISPs, and the new folks (Solucian Networking, if you’re in the greater Denver area) have been wonderfully responsive in working to get all the problems fixed.

The past week, as you might imagine, was extremely frustrating for me but I’m taking steps (such as the new ISP) to ensure it doesn’t happen again. My apologies to those of you who noticed and wondered what happened.

As of today, March 8, I am no longer an Amazon Associate — and neither is anyone else in Colorado. Due to the Colorado legislature’s ill-considered attempt to tax online sales, Amazon has done here the same thing it has done or threatened to do in other states which have considered enacting similar laws, and closed Colorado-based Associates’ accounts, relieving Amazon of the responsibility to collect Colorado sales tax.

Since I didn’t join the Associate program with the intent of making much money (I just figured, since I’m providing links to books of interest anyway, why leave money on the table?) it doesn’t affect my income in any noticeable way. It does mean that I, and every other Colorado resident, can continue to order from Amazon without getting hit by them for sales tax. (Of course, we all declare our out-of-state purchases and send in the appropriate tax ourselves, right?)

I’ll still link to Amazon (or B&N, or other sites as appropriate) for books I think are worthwhile, as a convenience for site visitors.

As one of the few people in the civilized world who hadn’t yet seen Cameron’s Avatar, I finally broke down and went to see it this past weekend. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of original story (Dances with Smu…er, Wolves meets Disney’s Pocahontas), I went because people like my friend Wil McCarthy, who knows how to tell a story, said it was still worth seeing for the 3D visuals. He was right.

One of the details — the kind of thing that lends a subconscious feel of verisimilitude — that I appreciated was the 3D pictures within the picture. Computer displays, photographs taped to a locker, etc, were each themselves in 3D. That’s non-trivial. It’s reminiscent of the myriad display screens visible in many of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s the kind of throwaway detail that adds richness to a movie, or a story. Avatar was visually wonderful. I can hardly wait until someone applies the technology, both the 3D and the motion-capture animation, to a film with a plot worthy of it. (Niven’s Ringworld, perhaps?)

Michael Stackpole has been posting recently about what writers should do to best survive the current shake-up in publishing (of which the recent Amazon-Macmillan-Apple fracas is just the latest round). Joe Konrath has been saying many of the same things for a while.

One key point is that writers should be making at least some of their work available as downloads independently of what their publishers are doing. (Contracts permitting, of course. You don’t short out your publisher on something you’ve granted them exclusive e-pub rights to.) As it happens the exclusivity period on a couple of my short stories (“Snowball” from the Footprints anthology for one) is at or near an end, so I’m considering making them available for download here.

That in turn raises all kinds of questions I’ve barely begun to think about. What format(s)? How much (if anything) should I charge, and how? (And a lot of factors go into that decision.) And so on. I’ve set up a poll over there on the right to let you vote on format(s). This is my first use of this plug-in so bear with me if it’s a bit flaky. Even better, go ahead and comment below and tell me what you think.

And hey, if someone wants to nominate “Snowball” for a Hugo, I’ll send them a free copy. 😉

Okay, so it’s a little later than most other people’s New Year’s postings. I’ll be backing and filling a bit.

I’ll be in Colorado Springs for the CoSine SF con this weekend. Always fun and I’m sorry I had to miss it last year. I’m starting the weekend on a high note, I just got the page proofs for my Analog story “Light Conversation”. It looks like it will be in the June 2010 issue, probably on the stands in early April (I just received my subscription copy of the April issue).

Speaking of Analog, congrats to my friend Brad Torgersen on his first sale to Analog, with a novelette, no less. He recently won in the 2009Q3 Writers of the Future Contest too. He’s making a big splash with his first two pro sales. Way to go Brad!

Today is Veterans Day in the US, Remembrance Day in Canada and the UK. (It is also marked in other countries under different names.) To all those who served: thank you.

MileHiCon, the Rocky Mountain regional science fiction and fantasy con, is this weekend. Come have a good time.

I’ll be there, I’m on a few panels, but don’t let that stop you 😉