Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

A bit breathless (see some of my previous publications on the right) but that’s the subject line for the email from Amazon DTP telling me that my Kindle edition stories/books (see Monday’s post are now on-line and available for sale. Now, before you rush off and buy them all, let me save you some money.

There are four new Kindle editions. Two are short stories (“Into the Fire” and “Snowball”), one is a novelette (“Renee”), and one is a collection (Starfire & Snowball) of all the above plus a bonus story (“The Gremlin Gambit”). The collection is the best deal at only $2.99. Individually the stories add up to $3.97, and you don’t get “The Gremlin Gambit,” although that’s available on-line from Mindflights.com, or from here as a PDF. (The story “Snowball” is also available in the anthology Footprints, available from Amazon in trade paperback edition.) As a bonus, I’ve added an author’s introduction to each story.

Amazon has some odd pricing rules. The minimum price — other than “free” — is $0.99, and they offer a better royalty percentage starting at $2.99. I may offer up a short story as a free sample in the future; I’m still getting my feet wet (and watching out for piranha — this is the Amazon). I expect buyers will opt for the better price point of the collection, Starfire & Snowball.

	Starfire & Snowball, a collection which includes all the stories below, plus “The Gremlin Gambit”.
The first Jason Curtis adventure, in T-space. Sometimes the only way out of the frying pan is …
	There’s nothing left of humanity but some hardware and footprints on the Moon. What do aliens make of it, and what happened?
Jason meets a girl, and then…     “‘Starfire, this is Kakuloa control. Are you declaring an emergency?’     Air hissed out of a bullet hole in my cockpit, yellow and red warning lights lit up my control panel, the fuel system leaked, my heat shielding was probably damaged, and my spacesuit was on the wrong side of a door to an airless compartment. Was I declaring an emergency?“

The above images link to the amazon.com pages. These ebooks are available from Amazon UK if you’re on that side of the pond. So, please give one of the above a try. If the stories aren’t quite to your taste (and while “Gremlin Gambit” has fairies, none of the others are at all fantasy) well, Amazon does have a refund policy. If you like them, please recommend to a friend. Happy reading!

Oh, and if you don’t have a Kindle, or something on which one of the free “Kindle for X” programs will run (PC, Mac, iPhone, etc), then please add a comment below. I’m looking at making these available via other channels. Cheers!

As I mentioned last week, I spent much of the past few days adventuring in the Amazon — Amazon DTP (Digital Text Platform) that is. That and getting a couple of my stories, which happen to be adventures (of Jason Curtis, owner/pilot of the Starfire) Kindle-ready and uploaded for sale.

The process is pretty simple for a work of fiction (ie no fancy formatting or graphics as might be needed in a textbook). I ended up spending most of my time working on images for the “covers”. That’s not strictly necessary. A plain gray rectangle with the title in plain text would work, but wouldn’t attract many customers.

I used the Gnu Image Manipulation Tool, the GIMP, a free/open-source imaging suite that is remarkably powerful. I kept learning new tricks. One strong suggestion: layers are your friend. Put each element — background, foreground images, title text, etc — on different layers, especially if you want to re-use some of them on different covers to maintain a theme e.g. for a series. For example, here are the cover images for the first two Jason Curtis stories:

The art itself is a mix of free-drawn and pieces of images from public domain sources (mostly NASA photos).

Converting the text is dead easy with a good editor (like vim) and a basic knowledge of HTML. Amazon’s upload process will convert other formats, including MS Word .doc, epub and Mobibook .prc, but does the best job with straight HTML. What I did to convert my text from OpenOffice was to, first, replace all italicized (or underlined) text with the same text surrounded by HTML <i> and </i> tags. (This involves regular expressions. I have no idea if MS Word is capable of this. I use Linux as my main desktop OS.) Then I just copied the whole thing and pasted it into new .html file that I’d opened with vim. A few global search-and-replace’s converted quote marks and m-dashes. The HTML header portion I cribbed from Shala Kerrigan’s web page on Kindle formatting. I previewed the HTML in my Firefox browser to make sure it wasn’t too horrible, and double checked with Amazon’s “preview” tool once uploaded.

It takes a couple of days between uploading the ebook (or estory) and it appearing for sale on Amazon’s site, as they run some checks and get their databases populated. You need an Amazon DTP account, but you can set that up online in a matter of minutes.

I have a couple more things to prep and upload yet. I’m making my story “Snowball” (which appears in the Footprints anthology) available as a standalone story, and I’m also going to put up a collection, Starfire & Snowball, with the Jason Curtis stories, “Snowball”, and “The Gremlin Gambit” (published in MindFlights last year). Amazon price-points are a little odd: it will be cheaper to purchase Starfire & Snowball, which includes the other stories plus, than the others individually — but it will pay a better royalty to the author (that would be me). So, go for the collection.

The next step, after I get back to doing some actual writing for a bit, is to convert these to some different formats and check out the programs at Barnes & Noble and at Smashwords. That and figure out the marketing side of all this. 😉

I’m having second thoughts about these Writing Wednesday posts. As I mentioned when I started, they were partly at the urging of another writing blogger who encouraged my more SF-genre slant on things, but I feel like much of it is just going over the same ground that several other, and more experienced, writers also cover. I’d rather write about new stuff, be that about writing, science, publishing, or whatever. So I’m going to put the “Writing Wednesday” titles on hold, although I still expect to post here on a regular (for some chaotic value of “regular”) basis. Sometimes even about writing.

This week I’m actually gearing up to do some publishing. I have a backlist of several stories that I’d like to experiment with in terms of making them available for Kindle or other e-readers. That’s a channel which is rapidly growing in importance, with Amazon reportedly now selling more e-books than hardcovers (and catching up quickly to paperback sales). I’ll be spending the next few nights and part of the weekend playing with different formatting tools and making “covers”. More on that project when I get something uploaded to Amazon.

This week’s entry is going to be a short one, but with some amusing links.

Hearkening back to installment 4, on the usefulness (or not) of spelling checkers and proofreading, this YouTube video is priceless: The The Impotence of Proofreading (warning, language may not be safe for work).

And if you’re wondering why we science fiction writers are really in the business, this video is a hilarious: F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury (and no, this one is definitely not safe for work, and yes, I’m kidding about the reason for being a writer).

No Writing Wednesday this week, today being Thursday. My time sense is still a little warped from NASFiC/ReConStruction this past weekend in Raleigh. It was a great time, and this time I stayed over until Monday morning which is part of why my time sense is screwed up. It feels like Wednesday to me.

The con was a little on the small side as such things go — the final attendance figures were somewhere in the 700-800 range, smaller than a regional like MileHiCon. I imagine part of that is the economy, and part of it may be that Raleigh’s a little harder to get to. Well, it is from Denver anyway. I went out via Newark and came back via Houston. My buddy Lou Berger came back via Tampa, I think.

But good things can come in small packages. There was a lot of great programming, and I got to meet and hang out with some fellow writers from Codex that I’d only met on-line before, including Lawrence Schoen, who I shared a table of contents with in Footprints and whose story there is up for a Hugo this year, and [at this point I am pausing with the sudden realization that if I start listing people, I’m going to feel obligated to list everyone, or feel bad about those I left out. Okay, I’m not going to list everyone, apologies and no slight intended to the rest of you] Mary Robinette Kowal, (2008 Campbell Award winner, current VP of SFWA) who hosted a release party for her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey. She’s a charming and intelligent lady, and a darn good writer. She reminds me a bit of Connie Willis in some ways.

Baen Books has their galactic headquarters near Raleigh (Jim Baen was smart enough to move out of expensive New York years ago) and there were a number of Baen folk in attendance (although they run a distributed operation). The Baen party Friday night was well attended and a lot of fun, with Toni Weisskopf being her usual intelligent and entertaining self. (And no, I’m not just saying that because I want her to buy my novel — although if I thought it would help, I might.) There were the usual Worldcon bid parties, too — Chicago in 2012, Texas (San Antonio) in 2013, and perhaps the best, London (UK) in 2014. These are all largely, so far as I know, uncontested, although there’s time for someone to mount another 2014 bid, and even a 2013 bid although the timing is tight on that one. Since London is my original home town, I’m supporting (technically, pre-supporting) their bid. They put a cool London 2014 video together to promote it, see how many SF/fantasy shows or movies you can identify. If London does win, then there’ll also be a NASFiC that year (location to be determined, I’m sure bids will start showing up as we get closer to the date.)

There are a lot of reasons that sf cons are worthwhile. I had a chance to meet with Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, who bought me (and writer Shane Tourtellotte) lunch in part so that I’d “feel obligated and send more stories” Stan’s way. That’s quite a compliment. I also find that the interaction with creative and intelligent people stimulates a lot of new ideas. I have several stories already in mind since coming back, and I’ve heard the same from other writers. You need to keep up the input to keep the output flowing.

And on that note, I need to sign off here and go write some of those stories down. Ciao.

“Writing Wednesday” may be a little short this time around, because of other time pressures.

This week I’ve been working on some editor-requested additions to a novel I have under submission. This falls under Robert Heinlein’s 3rd Rule of Writing: You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial request.

A couple of comments on that: It does not mean sending out first drafts. Heinlein’s 2nd rule is “You must finish what you write,” and note that “finish” means “polish” as well as “complete”. He also said “to editorial” request, not to an agent’s request. Now, if you have one of the top agents in the business, you might consider any suggestions they might make — but if you’re reading this, you probably don’t, and they probably wouldn’t.

Not that you have to rewrite even to editorial request: if you don’t agree with the suggestions, or they don’t make sense to you, you can always refuse and (if necessary) offer the piece elsewhere. Daniel Keyes pulled his short story “Flowers for Algernon” back from Galaxy magazine because the editor wanted a happier ending. He later sold it to F&SF and it went on to win the Hugo Award for that year. When he expanded it to novel length he first sold it to Doubleday — until the editor there also requested a happier ending. Keyes returned Doubleday’s advance, had the novel rejected by five other publishers over the next year, and finally sold it to Harcourt. It went on to win the Nebula Award and has never been out of print since.

In my case, the novel is no Flowers for Algernon, and the editor’s suggestions are at a rather high level (add so many thousand words, and make sure these questions about the backstory get answered). How I incorporate them is entirely up to me.

The other thing I’ve been doing is prepping for ReConStruction, the 2010 NASFiC (North American Science Fiction Convention) being held in Raleigh, NC starting tomorrow (Aug 5) and running through Sunday (Aug 8). NASFiC is held at irregular intervals, whenever the World SF Convention (WorldCon) is held outside North America; it’s in Australia this year.

Like most SF conventions, NASFiC is not a huge commercial media-focused convention like ComiCon or DragonCon which attract tens of thousands of attendees (who then spend most of their time waiting in lines…). Most SF cons are much smaller, less than a thousand, and traditionally focus more on “literary” (ie, written) SF/F. That “more” is relative, there’s plenty of programming relating to movies and TV, gaming, costuming and so on. If you like science fiction, cons are a great place to meet others with similar interests; enjoy the costumes, the art show, the game room, the video room; discover new authors; find that perfect tee-shirt or carved dragon or who-knows-what in the dealer room; and/or be educated and entertained in the various panel sessions. For readers, it’s an opportunity to meet some of your favorite SF/F authors.

For aspiring SF/F authors, they’re an opportunity to learn more about the craft and the business, to network with other writers, and perhaps a chance to meet a few editors. (At least two of my editors will be at NASFiC; that’s one reason I’m going.) It also gives your fans (both of them (grin)) a chance to meet you, and for you to get your name in front of a few more potential readers and fans. That’s a whole ‘nother topic — and coincidentally Joe Konrath, master of self promotion (he’s done his own tours hitting literally hundreds of bookstores) is blogging today that he’s phasing that out. But he’s been there and done that, a lot. I think it’s still worth it for newbies. (Maybe not the 39-state multi-hundred store tours, but at least getting to places — like cons — where fans of your genre congregate.)

It turns out this isn’t as short as I thought it would be. Get a writer writing and it’s hard to shut them off, I guess. Next time I’ll probably report on ReConStruction and talk about who knows what else. Meanwhile, keep writing … or go have fun at a con.

Eye wont two torque about spilling inn yore righting.

Okay, enough. That was probably harder for me to write than it was for you to read — but the built-in spelling checker didn’t complain about a single word. What I meant was “I want to talk about spelling in your writing,” and to make the point that you can’t trust computerized spelling checkers. They’ll happily tell you that you spelled the wrong word correctly — and sometimes complain about the correct word with a valid spelling.

Nothing turns a reader or editor off faster than a lot of spelling errors in a manuscript. (Okay, writing it in purple crayon on the back of a used paper lunch bag might, even if the words are spelled correctly on that bag.) To someone who reads for a living, even common errors — confusing “its” and “it’s”, or “their”, “they’re” and “there” are frequent — make the text as hard to read as my first line up there. Or worse. Even avid readers may have trouble with spelling, as one of my sons does

So, learn how to spell. Then turn off your computer’s spelling checker and especially turn off any automatic correction software. Seriously. Once you’ve written a few tens of thousands of words with that stuff turned off, and you’ve gone through and fixed typos like “hte” for “the” yourself, your fingers will have learned better the correct sequence. And you’ll have avoided all those times where the well-meaning but incredibly stupid software has changed a word you wanted to something it thought you meant. Besides, as Larry Niven says, “save your typos”. If you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, you might want some strange words, and Niven has invented several from mistyping other words. (The samlon creature in Beowulf’s Children comes to mind.)

Now, the spelling checker is a useful tool. When I’m done my first draft, I’ll turn it on and check for misspellings and typos. It’s useful for that, although I do find that I tell it to ignore more words than I let it change. Then read through the manuscript and fix all the places where you typed “their” instead of “they’re” (which a spelling checker won’t catch), or you paused in mid-sentence and typed “the the” or some other word duplication. Or just typed the plain wrong word because you were thinking of something else, mind racing ahead in the plot, as you typed. When I’m writing an action- or dialog-heavy scene, my fingers will sometimes type the homophone (word that sounds the same) for the word I meant, even though I know better. If I don’t catch that, I look stupid.

Don’t let your writing make you look stupid.

– – – – –

I’m in the middle of writing a significant addition, per editorial suggestion, to a T-space novel I thought was finished. (Although its been said that no novel – or any work of art – is ever truly finished, only abandoned.) For the next couple of weeks these entries will be on the short side. It’ll be worth it; the book is going to be way more fun to read than this blog.

It’s official, the anthology Space Horrors will be released on October 1, 2010, from Flying Pen Press. (The editor, David Lee Summers, hopes to have a few copies available sooner for CopperCon.) The ISBN is 978-0-9818957-6-5.

The cover art now has the author names listed, and I’m proud to say that my story, “Poetic Justice,” leads off the volume. Click the image to see a larger version.

Writing Wednesday was absent last week because I was travelling and my web connection was too unreliable to do the update. I’ll try to work out a better system next time. Sorry about that.

Last week I said that perfect manuscript formatting and making a great first impression is useless if you’re not submitting an actual story. It’s like showing up professionally attired for an interview — for a job you’re utterly unqualified for.

So how do you know if you’ve got story?

Well, do you have a plot? You can’t have story without plot. You can paint wonderfully descriptive word pictures, or slice-of-life vignettes, but those aren’t stories. There have been many attempts to categorize plots, with arguments about how many basic plots there really are. Thirty seven? Twelve?

Heinlein argued that they could all be boiled down to only three: boy meets girl (or these days, and in speculative fiction, sentient being meets sentient being); the man (or woman, or android, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri) who learned better; and the little tailor (man–or whatever–succeeds against incredible odds).

I’m going to tell you that there’s only one plot that matters: stuff happens to someone. (Note, though, that the best stories involve that someone not just passively accepting the stuff that happens, but reacting to it, or proactively making stuff happen.) What kind of stuff? Well, as Heinlein said, meeting a girl, learning better, or overcoming tremendous difficulty. Or any permutation, combination, or variation thereof.

Now, a plot is necessary, but it is not sufficient. I said “stuff happens to someone,” but is that someone worth reading about? You need an interesting character. The longer the story, the more interesting the character needs to be to sustain the story. Let me give a couple of counter-examples.

The “shortest SF story ever told,” by Fredric Brown, goes: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” We know nothing about the character, except that he is the last man on Earth. That’s interesting but it tells us nothing else about him. It doesn’t need to, that’s all we need to sustain the story. But don’t try to get away with retelling I Am Legend with that little characterization.

Or take Hemingway’s classic six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Arguably that’s not even a story. Where’s the stuff happening? And to whom? That’s off-stage. This kind of story is sometimes called hint fiction; the real story is merely hinted at. But Hemingway’s story is a powerful hint indeed. Ask any parent.

However, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not a Hemingway or a Fredric Brown — and even they didn’t try publishing stories that short early in their careers.

Is that it? An interesting character, and stuff that happens? No, we’re still not quite there. It should be interesting stuff, too, and it should happen in some logical sequence. Algis Budrys, author of many books and short stories and who taught at Clarion and the Writers of the Future workshops, had a seven point “formula” for successful stories. (It’s not the only such formula, there are others, and indeed it’s possible to come up with a successful story that doesn’t fit a formula — but it’s easier to learn the rules of the road in a car than on a unicycle. Get the basics down pat, then experiment.) Budrys’s formula begins with (1) a character, in (2) a context (or setting), with (3) a problem. The middle of the story covers the character’s repeated attempts to (4) solve the problem, which (5) fail. Finally (6) he succeeds (or fails permanently). The end of the story is (7) validation of the character’s solution.

This is all described in far more and better detail than I can put here, in Algis Budrys’s short book Writing to the Point: A complete Guide to Selling Fiction. I highly recommend it.

Prolific pulp fiction writer Lester Dent (among other things, as Kenneth Robeson he wrote most of the original Doc Savage stories) had a formula for writing his sort of action tale. If that’s of interest, search the web for “Lester Dent master fiction plot” and you’ll find his explanation of it on numerous sites. As Dent puts it, “no yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.” That’s no guarantee these days, since sensibilities change and that was Lester Dent writing those yarns in the first place, but his points are still relevant.

So after some practise you’re ready to submit your story — show up for that job interview — dressed for success and with some knowledge of what the job is about. The first words out of the interviewer’s mouth are “Bonjour. Comment allez-vous?” Oops. Better make sure you (your manuscript) and your interviewer (editor or first reader) are speaking the same language, which if you’re reading this is presumably English, not French. And not something that only looks vaguely like English.

Next week: grammar, spelling, and why you should never trust a computer.

I promised to talk about presenting yourself this week, more specifically about manuscript formatting. But before I talk about the latter, let me say a word about envelopes. Yes, there are still a few places that prefer postal (that’s snail-mail, not whacko crazy) submissions.

Remember, the guiding thought behind all this is to make a good impression on the editor (or first reader), so common sense and professionalism applies. Think about your manuscript as a job application, and act accordingly. Would you send a job application in a screaming fluorescent pink envelope? Sure, it would stand out from the crowd, but probably not in the way you want. Similarly, anything that has to be signed for — certified mail, FedEx, etc — is just going to annoy the recipient. (Also, unless you’re sending something that has been specifically requested overnight — and if you’re at that level, you don’t need to be reading this — don’t waste your money on any kind of express delivery; first-class mail is fine.) Don’t bother taping up the envelope either, that just makes it harder to open. You want the reader in a good mood when they first see your story, not frustrated from trying to tear open the damn tape or spending five minutes searching under the stacks of other envelopes for a pair of scissors.

Keep it simple. A 9×12 inch envelope (don’t fold the manuscript), sealed as designed. Myself, I prefer the white envelopes which self-seal when you peel off the protective tape, but the kraft or manila kind that you lick’n’stick are fine too. Use a damp sponge if you hate the taste of envelope glue as much as I do. And, make sure you get the address right.

On to manuscript format. This has actually been covered in several excellent sites on the web — and a few others with some odd ideas about formatting. Simply put: clean, readable, and certain information in standard locations to make it easy to find. “Readable” means a good sized, clear font, double spaced, with wide margins. That’s the general guide, now to specifics.

Many publisher’s submission guidelines specify Shunn format, which is standard format as described by William Shunn on his web site. There are a few minor changes to that which some editors will allow, but that is the best place to start. Courier, 12 point font, double spaced, one-inch margins all around, on white paper with appropriate details on the first page and header on every other page. (One publisher — who prefers electronic submissions anyway — calls Courier font “evil”. Copy editors editors actually prefer Courier, for reasons I’ll get into another time.)

To reinforce Shunn’s advice, SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) has this article by John Betancourt on their site. It explains some of the reasoning behind the requirements. Author Robert Sawyer (Flash Forward, Wake etc) has a sample manuscript and this checklist on his site. Sawyer suggests using Dark Courier font as it makes a somewhat heavier impression (and is thus easier to read) when laser-printed.

All of the above advice is actually worse than useless, though, if what you’ve submitted is just a bunch of words on pages rather than an actual story. Worse, because by sneakily presenting whatever it is in standard manuscript format, in a professional-looking package, the editor had to waste time reading it (at least the first page) rather than rejecting it for the hot-pink scented envelope or the calligraphic typeface on decorative paper. So next time, something on making sure your writing doesn’t suck.

PS: The Kris’n’Dean show
Dean Wesley Smith has just posted his and Kris’s workshop schedule for next year. These are rather unlike most writing workshops, but are invaluable for any writer serious about treating it as a business. In particular, the “Kris’n’Dean show”, being offered in March, is an overview that is a real eye-opener for newbies. I’d been around publishing and writers for years, and sending off the occasional story, but it wasn’t until being exposed to the “mini” version of the show that Kris (that’s writer/editor/publisher Kristine Kathryn Rusch) and Dean (writer/editor/publisher Dean Wesley Smith) put on at the Denver Worldcon in 2008 that I moved it up a notch and started selling. (Selling fiction — I was selling non-fiction years before, but that’s a different skill set.)