Around the end of December, I realised that January was going to be a hectic month. By the 31st, I had to:
- Finish planning and write Symphonie Magnifique;
- Finish researching, plan and write The Man Who Ate Germany, a piece on German unification under Bismark for SPM;
- Work with Allegra to plan and write a piece on being a Steampunk every day instead of just for gatherings and conventions for SPM;
- Think about, plan and write my story for an anthology being published through Vagrants Among Ruins;
- Read and review Hartman the Anarchist for SPM;
- And I’ve just found out about a Big Finish competition to pitch an idea for an audio drama featuring the Fifth Doctor (the best Doctor) and Nyssa.
In most realities, any one of the above would take a whole month.
I impressed myself and submitted Symphonie Magnifique to Crossed Genres on the 13th. I’ve since been working with Bismark, the mad Junker. I’m in London for the Steampunk Spectacular this weekend, but I still have confidence that it will all be done on time.
The anthology story has had to be pushed back due to factors outside my control. Partly, I’m relieved. I’m also partly annoyed, because I had a nascent, half-formed idea which I was beginning to nurture when I found I’d have to somehow keep the embryo warm but in status.
All this unfortunately means that I don’t have time for reading this month. Well, I do, but only reading which serves the Greater Good. That’s annoying, because I got some books for Christmas and spent the few pence I had left from my wages this month on more books. So, February I’m going to read. And no one can stop me!
As well as all the magazines and 'zines, we have:
- The Judge Dredd/Batman Files and Vendetta in Gotham. Seriously, Dredd vs. Batman? The first scene, the first scene, has Batman squaring off against Judge Death.
- Grandville. Written by Bryan Talbot and inspired by the work of nineteenth-century French illustrator Gerand, who worked under the pseudonym Grandville and frequently drew anthropomorphic animals. When it was claimed by both the furry scene and Steampunk scene, I decided I had to get it. It arrived on Tuesday, and it’s a beautiful book. It’s hard-backed and the covers are textured like those volumes from the 60’s which still lurk on my parent’s bookshelves, and the inside covers have an almost marbled design which echoes those same books. The binding is solid… in short, it’s turned all the shortcomings of graphic novel production into things to be proud of.
- Steampunk. Steampunk short stories collected and edited Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. I’d be a fool to walk away. Especially because I submitted Of Mice and Journeymen to the follow-up anthology, Steampunk Reloaded.
- The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Difficult though it’s been for me to accept, the world of SF/F has tended to be dominated by white, western, able-bodied men. The strange new worlds and brave new civilisations imagined have, a lot of times, had WWAM values at their core no matter the fantastical creatures which populate them, and the colonies and cities of the future are images of our western metropolises. It takes delicacy and skill to open up new cultures to old minds like mine, and I trust Lavie’s judgement to collect stories which, above any sort of agenda, are stories. They entertain, create and are driven by ideas and characters first and foremost. I brought this book because I need to read it and because the publishers need to be supported for producing it. Also, the publishers need to be supported!
- Crimea, by Trevor Royle. The Crimean war is, in my opinion, the Steampunk European war. In the comfortable houses of those in charge, it was a cluster-fuck of diplomatic and military blunders with each side only being saved by the disasters of the other. In the tents of the soldiers, it was filled with breath-taking acts of humanity and bravery by both sides which have become part of our treasured history. It was also the first ‘media war’, the battlefield ending up on the breakfast tables of London the same way the Vietnam war was beamed live into the living rooms of a generation.
There are probably enough straight reviews out there already, but I may write something about the Apex book on it’s Amazon page as @apexjason would like some good reviews there (even if he wouldn’t send me a review copy :P). I’m sure I’ll be inspired to write something here by all my reading. And I’m expecting to reap bountiful harvests of fiction-fertilizer, especially for The Colossus Engine, my Crimea war story about a plucky group of rag-tag soldiers and their attempts to destroy Britain’s ‘ultimate weapon’ before it can be used.
And it looks like I’ll have a chance to put some of those fiction-flowers to good use: I’ve just got an email from Absent Willows about a new fiction contest they’re running. The universe may or may not be trying to tell me something, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and act like it is. After all, of all the things you could piss off the universe is probably one to avoid.
(I actually wrote this on Boxing Day, but didn't have access to the Internet to post it today...)
Jeff VanderMeer and his wife Ann are putting together an anthology of Steampunk short stories called Steampunk Reloaded. The catch is that all the stories have to have been previously published, which is kind of handy for me: The only 'Steampunk' story I have presentable is Of Mice and Journeymen. So, I sent it off for consideration. It'd be nice to be accepted, but my hopes aren't high. They say they want things outside of the of normal Victorian Gentlemen in steam-powered spaceships thing, but I think Journeymen is a bit too far out.
It's not long now before it's exactly a year before the decade of the noughties closes. Apart from three major terrorist attacks in the West, two wars, a world banking crises and a global recession, what the hell has happened this decade?
When I was growing up, my family didn't talk much about the past, about who they were or where they'd come from. There was this set of rules that our extended family worked within, which they never really explained and I never really picked up. (My brother managed to pick them up perfectly though, so I must have been doing something wrong.) Now we're all older, they're a bit more open and I'm a bit more emotionally sensitive.
I spent Christmas Day with my parents, my brother and his finance, and my aunt and uncle. Everyone apart from me, my mother and my aunt (her sister) went to see where my dad works (I'd seen it already), and my aunt started talking.
When they were young, both my maternal grandparents worked. Their children--my mum, my aunt and my uncle--were looked after by a friend a few doors down who had four kids of about the same ages. I'm reliably informed that chaos--and in a few cases, bloodshed--ensued. The children grew up, my mum became a party girl, my aunt became the party girl's older sister and my uncle got into cars. The kids down the road grew up, one joining the army at fifteen, one moving to Australia, the others going their own way too.
The one who joined the army had six weeks leave, and came to see his childhood playmates. Knowing what was what, my aunt kept making excuses and leaving the strapping young lad and my mother the party girl in the room, alone together. Boys, you see, always came around to see her.
It wasn't until my mother cornered her sister in the kitchen and told her that the strapping young army lad hadn't come all this way to be left in the room with the sister of the girl he was in love with that something clicked.
And the best part is that they were married and lived happily ever after, the army lad and my aunt.
Childhood playmates becoming life-long partners. Isn't that the kind of wonderful thing you don't expect to see outside of cheap TV shows? Apparently it happens in my family, too.
(My uncle's career in the army was far from life-long and happy. It's a bit of a shame I can't talk in depth with him about it because it could be a real light on my opinions on armed forces, but I'm not going to poke old, open wounds.)
I'm not going to use that story in anything I write, because I don't want to write cheap TV shows. It's a lovely story, though, perhaps all the better because I'm not going to annex it. It can just stay as it is, a little slice of my family history.
Ever since I was about six years old, I've wanted to be 'a writer'. On my eighteenth birthday, I brought myself a bottle of Champaign which I planned to open and drink when I got my first book deal.
What it means to be 'a writer' is a question that's kept me tossing and turning in my sleep for the past twenty years or so. Is it when I get my first book published? When I earn the majority of my income from writing? When other people start calling me a writer?
By the time I was nineteen, I'd written two novels. They were high fantasy and probably not great, but it took dedication and inspiration. Those are the two things that have keep me plugging away at this whole 'writer' thing and kept me convinced this was the path I'm at home on.
I started writing short stories because that's where people like Asimov and Bradbury started (at least, that was my understanding at the time). In the last few years, I've realised that science-fiction and fantasy short stories are not just an art to themselves but a whole world to themselves.
Always with an eye on that bottle of Champaign (when I can call myself 'a writer'), I've been following this whole, 'pay rates fail' thing which has been blowing around the blogs at the moment. How much should writers been paid, and when a writer can call themselves a professional?
The Steampunk Soiree was, financially, a bit of a disaster. Everybody who attended had a great time and would love to come again, but everybody who attended isn't going to come close to paying for all the bands. Less professional, and more farce. A very fun farce, but a farce non-the-less. We're yet to do the sums, but if we can pay people's expenses it's going to be a miracle of some description (hey, we have our hopes up--it's Christmas, after all!) Effectively, the artists had to pay to work.
Issue #6 of Steampunk Magazine was, financially, a bit of a disaster too. It was a lot longer than normal and there wasn't enough money in the kitty to cover expenses. It was supposed to be my first ever payment for something I'd written, but I waived it and have already happily foregone any payment for anything I write for Issue #7. And, of course, SPM is released under Creative Commons non-profit accreditation licence, so someone can take Of Mice and Journeymen, reprint it and re-write it as much as they like.
So, let's say a reasonable pro pay rate for a short story is 5 cents a word. £1 is $1.1211 at the moment, so 1p is 1.1211c. So, for every word I'd get 4.4599p. I need about £900 a month to survive. That means I'd have to sell 20,180 words (or there abouts). Assuming an average story of mine is 7,000 words, that's three pro-sales a month. That's also assuming there's no cap on pay and magazines don't mind paying me $350 for a story. (Of course, this doesn't take into account charges for changing currency which is something that's yet to come up in the Great Pay Debate.)
There's three immediate problems I can see with this:
1) If I quit my day job, I could probably rely on writing one 'as good as I can write' story a month. A good month could produce three, if it was a really good month;
2) Selling three pro-rate stories a month would mean an awful lot of socialising and networking for me, and people scare me;
3) After 36 stories in the first year, people are going to get pretty damned sick of me.
There's non-fiction--which is apparently even harder than short story writing to make money out of--and workshops--which runs into 2)--which could top up my earnings. Maybe there's other avenues I'm not aware of at the moment. For the moment, though, I've not really got any qualms about ruling out making a living from my writing.
As a result of the pay debate, I've decided to start sending my work to pro- and semi-pro markets. Maybe I'm not good enough yet, but I'll keep striving to get better. Am I doing it for the money? Well, a couple hundred quid would be more than welcome but the short answer is, 'no'. I'm doing it because the slush pile at those magazines is huge and you've got to really shine to be picked out. And, probably more importantly, because the people whose work I love reading sometimes read those magazines.
When one of my stories appears in Interzone along side Jason Sanford, maybe then I'll crack open that bottle. Or maybe I'll wait until John Reppion says, 'hey Foxie, loved the story--it gave me an amazing idea!'. Of course, my snarky side wants to wait until one of my stories triggers its own xyz-fail shit storm.
The money=good thing is something deeply embedded in my psyche by a middle-class upbringing (I gave my Dad a copy of 'Mind Games' to read, because I thought he might like to see what his son was doing with his life, and his first question was, 'how much money did this make you then?'). Hanging around with Steampunks is really making me challenge and question that, and more and more I'm convinced that's wrong. Is playing to a crowd of 40 at a loss better than playing to a crowd of 200 with a nice paycheck? You can't make a habit out of it, but if those 40 people are inspired and those 200 are just drunk then, well, it probably is.
If I wanted to make money, I'd have followed my brother's lead and become an accountant. If I want to make money from writing, I'll follow James Patterson and top my bank balance up writing whargarble for the Murdoch press. I'm not saying these things are easy, but that's where the money is.
If I get myself in the pro markets, maybe in twenty years time someone will offer me a T.V. show. Maybe by the time we've gone through the sixth Soiree, we'll be able to make a profit, I'll enjoy socialising and people will be saying, 'talk to Foxie, he'll make it happen for you'. Perhaps people will be thinking, 'I need an opinion on this, what's Foxie thinking?'. Five years down the line, yeah I'll probably still be in the day job. Ten years, maybe. Twenty years? Thirty years? I don't know. Money is nice, but transitory. Reputation is permanent, and it takes decades to build up one of those. I've been at this twenty-five years already and maybe I won't be opening that bottle for another twenty-five. I'm okay with that. I'm a writer. As sure as some people are homosexual or Olympic athletes, that's who I am. That's who I'm going to be until the day I die, so I'm okay going slow and steady because I've got the time. Hell, that's really all I've got to do with my life.
Writers should be paid a fair wage for their work, but that's never going to happen when there's so many of us. Unless your name comes out the cosmic lottery machine, you're never going to make a living from just writing fiction. (Oh, people win every week but you'd be daft to count on paying your mortgage with a lottery ticket.) The underlying problem which no amount of e-ink can change is that there is not the audience to support SF/F writers. Even with the success of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Reboot, the general public don't particularly want to read thought-provoking, innovative SF/F short stories. They want Opera and Will Smith. They want to give their money to franchises they can trust, actors they know and authors who entertain without challenging. It takes a degree of imagination and intelligence to gain something from the SF/F short story world as it is at the moment, and the general public are increasingly wanting to just dumbly consume.
So if you're arguing that writers should be able to make a living from their work, you've lost before you've begun. There's not enough interest to generate enough money to make that position viable. It's not the fault of the magazines or the writers or the advertisers. What we produce simply isn't what the masses--the paying public--wants.
We publish to talk to each other, to inspire each other. A story in a pro magazine means that an editor with a towering slush pile has decided this piece has something to say. That's why I'll read and think about everything in Interzone, regardless of how much I personally enjoy the story. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks like that, either. 5c a word is the honey which brings in the bees, and the editors need to fulfil their end of the bargain by picking the diamonds out the slush. That's their reputation and track record. The currency itself becomes a value, a number in part of a larger equation and independent of what goods and services it can be exchanged for.
But that's just me. If the majority of writers in the SF/F world agreed, John Scalzi and everyone else wouldn't have batted at eyelid at Black Matrix, instead just deciding that the number the equation came out with was too low and passing on to other things. 
The good news from Pittsburgh is that is all changes against the Tortuga Twitter Two--good friends of Steampunk Magazine and freedom lovers everywhere--have been dropped. Just a little bit of pressure, and the government drop the case quicker than a flaming, radioactive, Arab-looking potato. I guess they wanted to make a statement and weren’t prepared for any sort of fighting back.
The bad news is that, not only are they not going to have their possessions returned in the near future, but the feds have been given the go-ahead to rummage through everything to see if there’s anything which takes their fancy. They can make copies of any electronic data before returning their laptops, memory cards and other electronic gumpth.
The property was seized under a Grand Jury investigation, the purpose of which remains a mystery. Of course, if they find evidence of other crimes during the searches, I’m sure they’ll be sure to prosecute.
So it turns out that, if you live in the US and you do something the government don’t like, they can harass, bully and try to intimidate you, steal your possessions, invade your privacy, and search every aspect of your life to see if they can find a crime you’ve committed. Whose freedoms are being protected here?
The idea that governments exist to protect freedom or protect people is of course a mis-conception. Like any body with power, governments exist to protect their own power. I guess it’s just kind of scary to see it so naked. I guess it’s also scary because, although I believe in what the Professor was doing and I believe in the cause he’s fighting for, and although I’m in another country with another government… I’m scared that it might be me one day. One day, I’ll be trying to do what I think is right, and it’ll be me sitting where he is.
If one good thing can come of this, it’s that they seized copies of Steampunk Magazine and a few more people out there might enjoy Of Mice and Journeymen. Hey, if I can’t be selfish and glib, what have I got left?
It's been a bit of a fight, but SteamPunk Magazine #6 is now out! It's free to download, or you can purchase a copy for $5 and have it delivered to your door.
From their press release ('press release'... isn't that posh?):
“The theme for the issue is 'The Pre-Industrial Revolution', offering an opportunity for us to begin explore the pre-Victorian aspects of the steampunk ethic, and the many faces of steampunk before and beyond the constraints of the Duskless Empire. It also investigates the ways in which steampunk is often an unindustrial (if not pre-industrial) revolution in its own right. All on top of a glut of regular content, such as features on:
Alchemy;
The Luddites;
Victorian Martial Arts;
Creating your own steampunk sculptures;
Building your own windmill;
An interview with British steampunk outfit 'Ghostfire'.”
It also has Of Mice and Journeymen in it! Very proud to have a piece of fiction in this issue, especially as it's appearing along side the likes of John Reppion. Leah Dearborn's The Useless Pistol is also an amazing piece of work and well worth taking the time to enjoy. And there's some quality non-fiction in there, too, but I don't want to sound like I'm on the advertising payroll so I'll just say I particularly enjoyed the Alchemy and Romantics pieces.
Wahoo! I Is in print!
Been a while, I know. Stevie (the car), Scotland, my ISP and work have knocked the wind out of me of late. Work has reached the point where there is serious talk in the Fox/Hawksmoor household of quitting and moving 100 miles down the road to Chester.
While in Scotland, I read through El Sombra, the second in Abaddon Books’ Pax Brittania world. I’ve passed their first one, Unnatural History around a few people. I wrote an enthusiastic review of it for Steampunk Magazine #6. T’other Paul (we already had one Paul when he started) had it next and loved it like I did. ngaio and Allegra were less than impressed--Allegra didn’t even finish it, and ngaio only finished it so she could understand what T’other Paul and I were talking about.
El Sombra was better, in my opinion. In a small Mexican town, a masked vigilante fights to free his people from the Nazi’s. Loud, bright, explosive, no-holds-barred pulp action Saturday morning pictures extravaganza. Bereft of characters or moral ambiguities. Great fun.
Since coming back to Wales, I’ve also read Rob Grant’s Backwards. I’d read all the other Red Dwarf books years ago, but somehow never managed to get through to this one. Far better than Doug Naylor’s offering, The Last Human. Backwards had a stronger plot, better writing and one bit where I laughed out loud. I haven’t done that when reading a book since... blimey, I can’t recall a single time.
And I simply can’t forget to mention Ray Bardbury’s The Illustrated Man. Fahrenheit 451 is a book which has endured with me and I frequently say is my favourite. The Illustrated Man has some pretty good stories, and some amazing ones. The Highway, The Long Rain and Kaleidoscope are worth a mention. I find it hard to explain what I find so hypnotic about Bradbury’s writing. He’s like a magician: He’s standing there, nothing up his sleeves and you watch him wandering around on stage, perfectly ordinarily. And then he stops, and you realize he’s built this amazing, beautiful home to ideas which whisper gently to you when your brain is just running idle. If I knew how he did it, I’d be copying it. Without shame.
Scotland was an amazing experience. The most enduring part of has been the silence. We had no computers, no television and only watched one video the entire week. We had music playing just one evening, and that was it. There were no neighbours, no road and cars, no people walking around outside. Just the sea and the birds and the wind. Since coming back, Allegra and I only have the television if there’s a specific programme we want to watch. At the moment, it gets turned on at 8:00pm on Sunday for Top Gear, and back off again at 9:00pm. The elimination of just that background noise from out daily lives has made the whole world seem different.
I get +1 Geek Points for following @isaacasimov, and another +1 for buying a mobile so I can update my Twitter when I’m away from the ‘net. The mobile is a Motorola W377, a slim flip phone. I have vague ideas of turning it into something resembling a cigarette case.
The copies of Steampunk Magazine #6 are back from the layout guy. There’s a lot of proof-reading in my future. I may have only had a minor part in putting it together, but it’s going to be amazing to see it all there, together, just like a real magazine! And, of course, Of Mice and Journeymen is appearing in there. I’m very excited about that. My first paying story, ever! 
Posts
