publishing news

My author friends are all a-twitter about Penguin and Random House combining to form the world’s largest book publisher. Of course, any deal that big will be subject to regulatory approval. The deal should close in the second half of 2013, and the new firm will be called Penguin Random House.

There's a really nice article over at www.digitalbookworld.com as well as several related articles such as What the Random/Penguin Merger Means to You. Certainly, some employees of these two companies will lose their jobs. But probably if you're a writer with one of these publishers--and you're selling--the merger won't affect you. Why? Because authors produce the product, and there is no publishing business without them. Also, frankly, authors aren't that expensive. It's not like they give us health insurance or anything like that.

This deal is a symptom of the chaotic publishing industry and I'm sure it won't be the last big change we see. As a bibliophile, I really, really hope publishers and paper books continue for a long time.

What do you think? Are big publishers an endangered species?

dialogue tips from a master

I went to a fun conference this past weekend: MileHiCon, the annual Denver science fiction conference. A highlight was the dialogue workshop taught by Grand Master Connie Willis. Here are some of her tips (in no particular order):

• Dialogue is not like real-life conversation. It's more concise. Omit all those 'hellos' and 'goodbyes' and 'ums.'
• Don't use too many dialogue tags. Use as few tags as possible, without confusing the reader.
• Authors shouldn't write more than about four lines of uninterrupted dialogue. No soliloquies unless your name happens to end in Shakespeare.
• Characters should never talk about things they both already know. For example, a character should never say, "As you know, Bob, we've been married forty years."
• The exception to the above rule is: unless it's in a fight. For example, in an argument you could say something like, "Bob! We've been married forty years and you've never once picked up your socks!"
• Dialogue should serve a purpose such as moving the story forward, giving information, and/or contributing to characterization. The more it accomplishes, the better!
• Create subtext in your dialogue. How? Use non-verbal communication to suggest something different from what the characters are actually saying. Willis used some movie clips as examples. In the 1966 film Walk, Don't Run a couple sits in the back of a cab. The woman talks about how wonderful her fiancee is, all the while gazing in infatuation at the man sitting next to her (not her fiancee). The man starts kissing her and she kisses back and talks about wonderful fiancee "Mr." Haversack. It's a fun and effective scene.

That's all I remember for now.
What are your dialogue tips?

author discovery

I discovered a new author recently: K.A. Bedford.

K.A. Bedford has a very good series which starts with Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait. I know, how could it not be good with a title like that? The hero is Aloysius "Spider" Webb, a disgraced police officer, who fixes time machines and hates his job. The story really begins with Spider finding a time machine hidden within another broken time machine containing a dead body. What starts as a simple curiosity that his former police training can't ignore, grows to encompass alternate time-lines, future versions of himself... Well, I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say, the plotting, world-building, and characterization will have you hooked.

Paradox Resolution continues the adventure. The blurb says, Aloysius ‘Spider’ Webb fixes time machines for a living. He’s a hard working ­Australian bloke — a good man in a bad ­situation who is willing to do almost anything to regain his self-respect and the affection of his nearly ­ex-wife, Molly; a mad sculptress on her way to international fame and fortune. Spider’s new boss at the Time ­Machines Repaired While-U-Wait franchise needs help: his ­secretly built, totally ­illegal, ­radically over-clocked, hotrod time ­machine has been stolen, and Spider is the right man to get it back before it falls into the wrong hands, or worse, inadvertently destroys the entire universe. You can even read chapter one here.

Have you discovered any new authors lately?

quantum fiction

I have a confession: I love quantum physics. So, as you might imagine I'm pretty jazzed that a scientist from one of my alma maters just won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 was awarded jointly to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems". Read all about it on The Novel Prize in Physics site.

So, of course, I also love quantum fiction and often write it and read it. In case you aren't familiar with the term, Wikipedia says Quantum fiction is a literary genre that reflects modern experience of the material world and reality as influenced by quantum theory and new principles in quantum physics.

Last week I discovered author Paul Melko. His novel The Walls of the universe is quintessential quantum fiction and so good. John Rayburn, an Ohio farmboy, is tricked by his own doppelganger into using a broken universe-hopping device, sending him on a one-way trip to a dozen other, bizarre universes. He must use his wits to find his way back to his home universe, without running afoul of the mysterious forces afoot in the multiverse.

His novel Broken Universe is also very good. John and his friends have been trapped in a parallel universe while they try to build dimension-hopping transfer device, and when they finally get back to their home universe, they find that the Alarians have exploited the homemade transfer device john left behind. John and his team have got to stop them before they use the transfer device to unleash themselves upon the multiverse. Along the way, John and friends recruit an army of their doppelgangers to help them build a transdimensional company.

Besides the awesome plotting and really cool quantum physics ideas, these novels work because the protagonist John is extremely likeable. The novels also address the whole nature versus nurture paradigm. Do we all contain good and evil? Exactly what would it take for evil to win out?

What good books have you read recently?

invisible intentions

I had a funny thing happen recently. I finished the first draft of a story and followed my own advice: I asked several critique partners what happened in the story. I got several totally different interpretations!
You either have to laugh or cry. I choose to laugh. :)
A couple people did interpret the story the way I intended it. A lot of people went off on weird tangents, taking small story details and running with them. So, yes, I will be working on that story today and I will be removing all those apparently intriguing details.

This experience relates to Verlyn Klinkenborg's blog at The New York Times from earlier this week: The Trouble With Intentions. Among other things he says,
Your opinion of what your sentence means is always overruled by what your sentence literally says. and This means you’ll need to write, and revise, as if your intentions were invisible and your sentences will be doing all the talking, all on their own. This may be the hardest thing a writer has to learn.

I agree. This is one of the hardest thing a writer has to learn. The hardest thing for me, however, is divorcing my intentions from the literal sentences, seeing what is really on the page. Klinkenborg also says,
Seeing what your sentences actually say is never easy, but it gets easier with practice.

Good luck to all of us!

metafiction

I saw an interesting movie this past weekend The Words.
This is a metafiction film. Here, by metafiction, I mean fiction about fiction, or more specifically, fiction which refers to or takes as its subject fictional writing and its conventions.

In a nutshell, here's the plot: a famous author, Hammond, reads portions of his novel to the public. Hammond's novel is about an author, Jansen, publishing a novel via a circuitous route. Jansen's novel is the story of yet another author, referred to as "the old man."
Are you confused yet? :) Actually, the levels within levels aspect of it really reminded me of the 2010 movie Inception, which had dreams within dreams within dreams.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed this. Of course, writers are predisposed to like movies about writers. One of the neatest aspects of it was the concept that writers might prefer their fictions to their reality. I know I like some of my fictional characters better than some of the real characters I know. :)

Can reality ever live up to our imagination?

Or, put another way, are the sacrifices an author makes for their art worth it? At what point has a writer given up too much of his/her real life?

What do you choose: fiction or reality?

optimism or pessimism in fiction

I just finished an awesome book This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan in which the characters tried to eliminate war and suffering on Earth.

It reminded me of fascinating comments made by Robert J. Sawyer in reference to his WWW Trilogy in an interview. I asked about the idea of a moral arrow through time: "the same force-complexity-that produces consciousness also naturally generates morality, and that as interdependence increases, both intelligence and morality will increase."

He said, You may say I'm a dreamer-but I'm not the only one. My own thinking on these issues has been informed by many other people, including the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and nonfiction author Robert Wright, who wrote Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny and more recently The Evolution of God. Bob and I were recently both speaking at a public-policy conference in Washington, DC., sponsored by the New America Foundation; it was the first time we'd met, and we've become friends. But, yes, I'm a dreamer, and an optimist, but I'm also a realist, I think-and I don't think those are contradictory things to be.
This fiction is uplifting and optimistic! Optimism in fiction can be very effective.

At the other extreme, I just started reading The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi. This book is very dark and dramatic. The teaser copy says Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die.

This reminds me of fascinating comments made by Warren Hammond in reference to his KOP Trilogy in an interview. I asked: SF academic Edward James has said "the ability of the writer to imagine a better place in which to live died in the course of the twentieth century, extinguished by the horrors of total war, of genocide and of totalitarianism." Do you agree? Disagree?

He said, I've never heard that before, but I have to agree. I don't think it's true for all writers, but it is for me. I've seen the ovens of Auchwitz and toured S-21, the Khmer Rouge's infamous prison that held an estimated 17,000 prisoners between 1975 and 1979. Of the 17,000 prisoners who went in, there were only seven survivors. Seven.

The truly horrifying thing is knowing these atrocities were committed by regular people. Not all Nazis were monsters. And not all Khmer Rouge were monsters. Many were patriots. Many were idealists. Many were just scared to stand up to authority.

Knowing how easy it is for humans to kill each other, I find it impossible to imagine a future where our problems will all be solved.
Very dramatic! Clearly, pessimism can also be very effective in fiction.

What's your preference in reading and writing? Optimism or pessimism?