Category Archives: A Writing Life

384. How to Sign an Ebook

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I was involved in a book signing years ago, and had/will have two at Westercon. [Two weeks from now as I write this, one week ago as you read it.] Which begs the question — how do you sign an eBook? I’ll answer that below, but first . . .

Jandrax came out in 1978, and the Stacey’s book store in the local mall invited me to do a signing.

READERS PLEASE NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY REALITY.

After writing that last sentence, I did a quick internet search to see what happened to Stacey’s. I knew it disappeared later, but I couldn’t remember what year. I discovered that my Stacey’s was a spin-off of the well known San Francisco store and I had to work my way through obituaries to that great institution. I finally found someone who knew the fate of my local store. It closed in 1994. To quote my source: 

 . . . in 1994, Borders and Waldenbooks joined forces – and like a tidal wave of orcs, they swept across the land, mercilessly engulfing independent bookstores. Ashes to ashes, Stacey’s.  RIP, The Bookstore in Modesto.

Waldenbooks? I had completely forgotten them. They used to be at the other end of the mall, but they too are gone with the wind. I liked that store. I also liked both of the Borders stores that were within driving distance. Barnes and Nobel wiped them out years ago.

The upside is that Barnes and Nobel is also a fine bookstore with two local outlets. Today it is beleaguered by Amazon. If they go I’ll miss them, too.

I also miss The Bookstore, a true independent in another location across town. It was replaced by a Christian bookstore. The Christian bookstore went out of business later. Apparently, not even God can fight The Big Book Monopoly.

Because I like old books, and because I am usually short of cash, I shop at used bookstores. There are half a dozen in my five county area, but I also know of another ten, all of which have gone bankrupt in the last two decades. Ironically, when I want an old book that isn’t available locally, I buy from used bookstores on the internet — brokered by Amazon.

If you want to buy my latest novel, Cyan, you have to go to Amazon for now, where you can download it or order it in paperback. On July 17 it will become available everywhere. That is, everywhere on the internet.

The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away. That’s not a battle cry, just a recognition of the reality of change.

So back to what I was saying:  Jandrax came out in 1978, and the Stacey’s book store in the local mall invited me to do a signing. It was great fun, although most people stopped, smiled, looked, and left without buying a copy.

When things got slow, the manager explained some of the financial realities of his life. He said that when books came in, and didn’t sell, it would cost too much to send them back. They simply ripped the covers off and sent them back instead, for full credit against their account. Then they threw the coverless books into the dumpster.

He pulled a copy of Silmarillion, just published, off the shelf, tore off the cover, and gave it to me. He said he would return the cover and it wouldn’t cost him a dime.

I took it. I didn’t want to insult my host, but I felt guilty at the time, and I still do. It sits on a shelf in my library, an odd souvenir of my book signing. I still haven’t been able to force myself through it, so it remains unread. Tolkien without hobbits is a hard go.

I thought of that event three years later when A Fond Farewell to Dying came out with a cover that was — not beautiful. It didn’t sell. I had a vision of book store managers everywhere taking one look at the cover, deciding it wouldn’t sell, ripping it off for credit, and tossing FFTD into the dumpster, as unread as my copy of Silmarillion. Maybe that is just me making excuses.

Maybe not.

So here we are, back in the present. I have two book signings coming at Westercon, and Cyan is primarily an eBook. What to do? EDGE, my publisher, allows me to buy print-on-demand copies, so I ordered 50. I’ll keep some for myself and take the others along.

For the other thousand people at Westercon, I am making up a half-page, double-sided sheet with a thumbnail of Cyan’s cover, the Westercon logo, and a sample of text from chapter one. It amounts to a come-on for the eBook and a weird souvenir for those who attend Westercon. At least it gives me something to sign at the “book” signing.

Still, it was more fun signing a physical book.

Welcome to Summer

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Hi, just a personal note, here; not one of my usual mini-essays.

I went to Tempe, Arizona to Westercon over the Fourth of July weekend. It was from 109 to 111 or thereabouts, but I felt no pain because the Mission Palms was well air conditioned. I have a report on that scheduled for the 11th.

I came home to find things weren’t much cooler. Yesterday was 109 here in the foothills of the Sierras, so my wife and I cut out for the coast and spent a few hours walking along the beach at Carmel. Today I’m home, hiding under the air conditioner, working out the details of a new novel that was sparked at Westercon.

I am also watering our non-native trees. When I just went out to change the sprinkler, I saw two mother wild turkeys with twenty-one gawky, half-grown chicks in our yard. They were panting, and looking miserable.

They and I are both asking — is it fall yet?

379. Westercon

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You know that I write these posts in advance, and it’s a good thing because today I am leaving for Tempe, Arizona and Westercon 70.

Westercon is a western US regional science fiction and fantasy convention. It has been around since 1948, when the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society organized it for those who could not travel to the east coast where most Worldcons were held at that time.

This will be my third Westercon. I attended Westercon 33 in Los Angeles the year Zelazny was the guest of honor. I stepped out for air during the afternoon and a lovely young woman told me I looked lonely (I wasn’t), told me she was a wannabe actress – actually she said “I’m just an LA nobody” – and told me the story of her life. I know what you’re thinking. There is no romantic ending, no money changed hands, and she didn’t steal my wallet. I think she was just exactly what she said she was.

Later that night I was cornered at a party by a guy who wanted to tell me about his screenplay. He wouldn’t take the hint that I wasn’t interested, or that I was in no position to further his career. The screenplay turned out to be for a space opera about a ray gun shooting femme fatale. He whipped out a copy of Playboy and showed me a beautiful naked black girl on the centerfold. He said she was the one he had in mind to play the part.

I don’t remember his name (a high functioning forgettery is a very useful tool) but he is probably living in a big house in Hollywood today. The plot was just dumb enough to sell.

I don’t think most Westercons are that weird, costumes notwithstanding. I think it was just LA.

The next year Westercon 34 was in Sacramento. It was a bit more sedate and I gave the paper “How to Build a Culture”. There was a good turnout; as best I can remember a couple of hundred attendees in a small auditorium. I had prepared a piece of mat board with a hand-drawn circle, divided into four pie-slices with the words environment, technology, world view, and biological structure hand written in the quadrants. It was makeshift because my first computer was still five years in the future.

When I said, “Which brings me to my visual aid”, I stood it up and, to cover it’s crudity, added “We have spared no expense!”

The joke got the small chuckle it deserved, but the sound died instantly. A young man in the middle of the auditorium was saying, in a conversational voice, “He is showing a chart. It’s circular, divided into quadrants . . .” We all realized that he was describing the chart to a blind companion, and for the length of time it took him to give his description, you could have heard a feather drop in the room. The respectful silence from crowd made me proud to be a part of the moment.

Last year I wanted to go to Westercon 69 in Portland. I hadn’t gone during all the years of my dry spell; it just didn’t seem like it would be fun under the circumstances. Then Cyan’s release was delayed again, so I skipped Portland. Now that Cyan is out, I am off to Tempe.

It will be good to be back.

378. Science vs. Magic (3)

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This is the last in a set of posts which acts as a backdrop to the Westercon panel Science & Technology versus Magic: what makes this such a compelling trope? I

It’s all about control, and how to achieve it.

I think we all understand pretty well how science and technology work. Even when we postulate something like FTL, which is contrary to our present understanding of the universe, we get to it rationally. We don’t get there by lighting candles around a pentagram.

Magic is another world, an alternate way of achieving control, and I see it falling into three types, with quite a lot of overlap.

First, there are the unconsidered, slobbering monsters of gothic horror and B movies. They just are. If they are the offshoot of a mad scientist or a nuclear explosion, we call them science fiction. If they are the offshoot of an ancient curse, we call them fantasy. Frankenstein and Dracula are examples of alternate strands, but really, they belong together. Their effectiveness is on our fears, not on our need to explain. And, no matter how the monster is overcome in the end — if he is —  the experience is all about not having control.

Second, there are magical systems which are simply science under different laws. Do this and that happens, just because that’s the way things work in one projected universe. Nobody did this better than Randall Garrett in his Darcy stories.

Third, there are supplicatory systems which assume that there are forces in the universe, and some of them are personalities. It is very transactional. Do something for the power, and the power will do something for you. But beware of the fine print in the contract. Every variation of the Faust legend falls into this pattern.

Many stories take on the colors of more than one system. In both Harry Potter and A Wizard of Earthsea there are spell that just work, like E=MC2 works, but there are also callings which evoke powers who are personalities, and usually not very nice ones.

These are logical systems, but nobody cares about them until we embed them in stories.

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On the question of science and technology vs. magic, a scholarly type could easily expend a thousand pages. That might be a little dry, though.

In our everyday lives, we all use science to make our lives easy, but there are some questions that science can’t answer. Which questions? We decide that for ourselves, and the tipping point is different for each person. After all, you can use your new self-driving car to go to the psychic and have your future told, if you are so inclined.

The same balance is found in stories of fantasy and science fiction. It is rare for a science fiction novel to completely lack the unexplained and unexplainable. Luke Skywalker had the Force. Every mutant in the 1950s had psi powers. In Jandrax, I put in a possibly Godly encounter because the book needed it. Most science fiction novels have a touch of magic somewhere.

On the other hand, novels full of magic still have physical laws. The sky is up and the ground is down. If you fall off a high cliff, you die. Of course you might use a levitation spell to save yourself — just like one of those mutants in 50s science fiction would levitate by their psi powers — but you wouldn’t need to if nature wasn’t trying to kill you. The physical reality of heat, cold, hunger, thirst and a fragile body are as much a part of fantasy as they are of science fiction — or romance novels, spy stories, or detective tales. It’s a long way from the Shire to Mount Doom if you have to walk. Frodo could have used a Lear jet.

The places we go in science fiction are great fun and sometimes scary.

In fantasy, we go places that are sometimes great fun, but usually scary.

Which journeys we take are a matter of taste. I would love to sail with Ged by a mage wind, or by the world’s winds, but I wouldn’t read H. P. Lovecraft on a Romnean ten thousand dollar bet.

377. Science vs. Magic (2)

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This is post two of three in another set which acts as a backdrop to one of the Westercon  panels. In this case the panel is Science & Technology versus Magic: what makes this such a compelling trope? This post continues from last Thursday’.

Religion has a relationship to magic, but it is not straightforward. It is more in the nature of finger pointing, as in, “My religion is the truth that underlies all things, including science and technology, but his religion is just mumbo jumbo.

You could say that religion and magic both are attempts to influence or control supernatural powers, but that doesn’t seem too accurate in our modern world. It might have made some sense when they were still burning witches.

Any Southern Baptist will tell you that no matter how much you pray for rain, if God has other plans, it isn’t going to happen. In fact, there is a Southern Baptist saying, “God always answers prayers, but his answer is often, ‘No.’” That doesn’t stop people from praying.

At least one of the major components of religion is also shared with science.  Recognition that we are so small and the world is so big — also known as humility — is a pan-human trait. Scientific types walk around looking at the sky and wondering when the next asteroid strike will come. Religious types walk around waiting for the Second Coming, or Ragnarok, or whatever terminal event their sect provides. Maybe magicians walk around wondering if their next spell is going to backfire and turn them into a toad; who knows?

All these types recognize that the universe is essentially beyond human control, and then set out to try to control it anyway..

Control over the uncontrollable is a pretty good starting point for the discussion of magic. Here is where religion flies in two directions. Many sects recognize that God cannot be controlled. He sets things in motion then wanders off, or maybe he pays attention to our everyday trials, but has a plan of his own. In any case, he can’t be compelled.

That position is a lot like science.

Other religions believe that God answers prayers, pays attention to burning candles, likes the smell of incense, and generally can be bought off. That type of religion is a lot like the magic we use in our fantasy fiction. If we make an incantation (light fantasy), some Thing will make an event happen. Or (dark fantasy) if we make a sacrifice, some malign Thing will make an event happen.

Actually, this is also a lot like science. Once the observation and experimentation phase is over, the results of science are used with confidence, not skepticism — just like prayer and supplication, are used.

(Is anybody out there chuckling at the similarity between A=9.8 m/sec2 and — as they say in Harry Potter’s world — Descendo?)

Not understanding what-the-hell is going on in the universe is the most basic of human experiences. Understanding brings about control. Believing that we understand brings about a felling of control, even if that feeling is unfounded.

Science seeks to mitigate this unease by reducing our ignorance. At its best, science is humble about this. However, when a physicist declares that we now know, fundamentally, how the universe works — and points to technology that works most of the time to prove it — it’s time for him to take off his lab smock and put on priest’s robes.

It all comes down to control. One of the things that makes Science & Technology vs Magic so interesting to us is that we all use science, everyday experience, and common sense to navigate and make sense of the world. And it works pretty well, most of the time — but not all of the time.

Ultimately tragedy strikes us, our families, our nation, or, potentially, our planet. Mortality walks behind us every day with its breath on our necks. We reach that place where logic and understanding fail, and we need more.

They say that there are no atheists in fox holes, but there are also no persons so sure of their place in heaven that they don’t feel fear when the reaper comes.

We all trust science — to a point — and then we need the hand of God. Or at least a good magic wand.  more tomorrow

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376. Live or Die

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The core story of Spirit Deer is survival, and the corollary is a complete absence of help.

It doesn’t happen that way much today. If you get lost in the woods, they send helicopters to bring you home. Yachts carry emergency beacons to fetch the Coast Guard. If there is a smashing at your door, call 911. Then hide in a closet. Be very quiet. The police will come soon.

It wasn’t like that when I was Tim’s age. 911 hadn’t been invented anywhere. The police were thirty miles away, and we didn’t have a telephone until I was fifteen. Cell phone? Don’t be silly.

That was the situation I was trying to create in Spirit Deer, both in the original adult version and the stripped down core story that became a juvenile. It wasn’t that I was trying to go back to an earlier era. 1975, or even the late 1980s when adult-Tim became young-Tim, was already closer to the world of my childhood than today. No, I don’t mean arithmetic. I mean that in 2017, it is hard to even imagine being alone.

In a lesser sense, I spent half my childhood alone. I would drive a tractor for hours every morning, eat a brief lunch with my dad, then spent more hours alone until the sun went down. My dad was always there, of course, on his tractor five hundred yards away on the other side of the field. He waved occasionally. That isn’t the same as being absolutely alone, but you are alone-with-your-thoughts, and you don’t have to talk. I liked that.

Being all the way alone, in the woods, hunting, tracking, and surviving, was something every boy of my generation wanted to do. And there were a lot of books to fuel the fantasy.

Most of the early Andre Nortons followed a pattern that looked like this: The young hero is the lowest member of a group that mistreats him. He is separated from them by circumstances no one could have predicted. For a time, he is alone. Then he reintegrates, tentatively, with a new and previously alien group. He does not remain alone, but being alone frees him, and gives him the strength to reenter society.

It is a primeval story. The young hunter sets out on his spirit journey, alone, to fast and endure great hardships, to gain his spirit animal, and return to his people as a man.

Fors, in Star Man’s Son, the first Norton I read, leaves his people because he is cast out for being different, goes on a great quest, finds a prize (knowledge, in this case) despite great hardship, and returns to his people. Only, he gets to take a telepathic puma on the trip with him. That’s even better than being alone.

Proving your manhood, whether you set out to do it, or it simply happens to you, is a big part of these books. A scholar might call them rite-of-passage novels.

I remember one book which I no longer have. A boy was living in a cabin in the woods and he was temporarily alone. I don’t remember where his father had gone. He got up in the morning, fried eggs on the wood stove, slipped an extra two between slices of toast, and put them in his coat pocket, picked up his rifle, and set out into the snowy woods.

I don’t remember the rest of the novel, but he set out. That was enough to make it great. There was a lot of setting-out in those books.

The best of them all was Two Hands and a Knife, the original version. (see post 309) Our hero (aka, the reader in disguise) has to join his parents, who have settled in a hundred miles away across the Canadian wilderness. So naturally, he packs his gear and his dog and sets out by canoe. Alone. (Except for his dog. Every boy needs a dog like that, unless he can find a telepathic puma.) There is a storm; he loses his canoe with all his gear. With the help of his dog, he makes it to shore and all he has is his two hands and his knife. And his dog.

Does it get any better than that?

Lets swing this all back to Tim, hanging in the tree in today’s Serial post, knowing that he has to either summon the strength to make it up to where the pine cones are, or he will die a slow and painful death of starvation. No one will help him. No one even knows where he is.

If this situation scares hell out of you, you are reading the wrong book. Self-sufficiency is useful. Knowing you can be alone, takes the power away from those who would call you different, and demand conformity. It is no small thing.