Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81

by E. Lily Yu

  Well, I’m a college English professor; I hope I’m not too much like Veronique, but there are definite autobiographical echoes there (I gave her my own dissertation topic, for instance). I also volunteered for seven years as a lay chaplain in a local emergency room, work I loved and stopped doing only because the hospital was sold to a secular for-profit that axed the Spiritual Care Department. So that part of Rosemary’s experience is very directly autobiographical. I wanted to give each of them a pre-existing problem that would be complicated and deepened by Melinda’s death, which is where Veronique’s career angst and Rosemary’s husband’s Alzheimer’s came from. As for Melinda and Jeremy, although I’m childless by choice, I’m fascinated by unusual family structures. That shows up in all of my novels, I think, especially Shelter. I’m very interested in families created by forces other than biology.

  Hen’s an interesting case. People keep talking about her as if she’s a major character, one of the POV characters, and she’s not. She’s there to facilitate movement and reconciliation, in various ways, among the other characters, which is one of the things good clergy do. I wanted her to be sympathetic, and I tried to make her realistic; she’s a combination of various Episcopal priests I’ve known. I wanted to write a book that showed church communities as groups of ordinary people, and that showed church functioning the way it really does, or can, in times of great pain: not as a source of answers, but as a focal point and gathering place.

  The POV character people tend not to mention is Anna, which is ironic since her sections of the book are about being shunned as a result of her son’s horrific crime and subsequent suicide. Anna’s situation is very loosely based on that of someone I know. Loving someone whose terrible actions you don’t understand, and who’s being reviled by the rest of the world, is a very lonely place to be.

  How do your experiences in academia and as a writer overlap, interact, and/or clash?

  The university-writing-church triangle is interesting; they all feed each other, but the interactions can get gnarly. There’s a fair amount of faith-bashing in the academy—one of my grad students once said, “Smart people don’t go to church,” and too many people believe that, especially if the church in question is a Christian one—and the faith elements in my fiction have definitely alienated some readers. I completely understand why this happens; organized religion has a lot to answer for, and many people have been so deeply hurt by faith communities that they can’t see anything but what they expect to see. This is definitely the land of confirmation bias. I know I’ve done something right when people squint at me and say, “You’re not like all those other Christians.” My father, a raging atheist who reacted with horror to my midlife conversion, once said that I was someone who gave the church a good name. That’s one of the highest compliments I’ve ever gotten.

  As an academic, I think and talk about writing and narrative a lot, which helps my own writing. On the other hand, I have very little time to read for pleasure, and grading student papers means that when I do have free time, the last thing I want to do is look at text. I get most of my narrative fix from audiobooks and TV, at this point. And like many academics, I do most of my own writing during summers and breaks.

  What’s next for you?

  I have two new stories forthcoming, one currently scheduled to appear on Tor.com on July 10, and one in F&SF, which I hope will be out this autumn. My work in progress includes three (count ‘em three) partial novels, with inception dates ranging from ten years ago to, uh, this morning. I’m very good at starting things and much less good at finishing them. I’m trying to be better about that part.

  About the Author

  Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

  Another Word: The Techs Can Do It

  Daniel Abraham

  “Consider greatness as a business strategy.” —Michael Swanwick

  I worked front-line tech support for a little mom-and-pop Internet service provider for almost ten years. I started off as the guy who asks you to check if your caps lock key is on. Slowly, I advanced to being Director of Technical Support, which in the context of a company that size meant I was still picking up the phone and asking about your caps lock key, only I was doing employee evaluations and management meetings too. Much of my view of the world was solidified at that desk.

  The advantage of small businesses is that they can be agile. Working with only a few dozen folks at the same office, it’s not as hard to coordinate change and make experiments, as it would be with a couple dozen divisions full of people scattered around the world. In the age of the Internet, change was a constant. I started off that job tracking down init strings for 28.8 modems. I ended my time there programming DSL routers for VPN. There was a lot of territory in between.

  And so along the way, we tried out a lot of new projects. Every few months, it felt like we’d be looking at how to roll out a new service or collect data to get a better picture of how the office was running. And, of course, all of these things required someone’s time and attention to make them go. The natural choice—and the one I pushed back on and fought against for years—was the floor techs. We weren’t a massive call center that tracked a new call to you as soon as the last one dropped. People had downtime between one email and the next. If we needed someone to test out the new backup system or see if the NT webserver was working or check the incoming routers into inventory, the techs could do it.

  And so the job got bigger and bigger, the responsibilities not just larger, but more varied. We had to be familiar with the new systems and how to fill out the proper paperwork. It became almost impossible to do a good job as the body of knowledge we had to master expanded with each new project. The choice came down to removing some of that work load from the techs so we could spend our time being technicians (and not inventory control and billing and installation schedulers and programmers) or else have techs spread so thin, that we were crap at everything.

  Which—you saw this coming, right?—brings me to self-publishing.

  Before we go on, let me make it clear that while I’m pretty much entrenched in the traditional publishing model right now, I’ve got nothing but respect for my friends and colleagues who are investing in self-pub. Everyone from the CEOs of the parent companies that own the publishers to the new writer just starting out is clear that we’re in the middle of a sea change. The publishing world now isn’t what it was ten years ago, or what it’s going to be ten years from now. No one knows for sure how this is going to come down, and I have no ground to criticize any other writer’s decisions about profit sharing and production models.

  But some things aren’t going to change. Publishing has always (and I’m going out on my limb here) will always be made up two games: writing beautiful things, and selling them. The first game is like chess, because when we’re playing it, we have control. We can choose every word and sentence. We can sit with something that’s not quite working and think. We can ask our friends for help or keep it to ourselves.

  The second game, selling, is gambling. It’s not just that we can’t control all the variables; we can’t even know what all the variables are. Maybe the book will find its audience. Maybe it will sink like a stone thrown in the ocean. There are a lot of strategies for bending the odds—book trailers, blogs, conventions, books tours, interviews—but no one is every really sure how well they work, or why one works one time and not another.

  That second game is hard and punishing, and it isn’t fair.

  Add to that, it has a lot of parts. Making the cover art. Laying out the cover. Getting blurbs, if you’re going that
way. Writing the cover copy. Editing. Copy-editing. Proofing. Formatting. Printing. Distributing. Maintaining inventory. Auditing. Arranging publicity. Even after a book’s draft is done to that absolute best of our ability, there are at least half a dozen more things that need to happen. All of them require their own skill sets. All of them can be done well or poorly. And all of them affect our odds when the time comes to roll the bones and let the book out into the world.

  The self-publishing models that intimidate me assume that the techs can do all that. Writing good books is a huge, complicated, profoundly difficult job to start with. It can take years of getting it wrong—sometimes badly wrong—before we even start getting it right. I am assured by my professional artist friends that painting and graphic design are much the same. Editing is a different set of knowledge, and damned hard. Self-editing is harder. Marketing and publicity require familiarity with a whole host of techniques and rules of etiquette and professional conduct. Sales needs not only a skill set, but a personality type, and I’m not convinced that it can be taught.

  When I’ve been with my friends and colleagues who are taking the self-pub route, the conversation almost always seems to turn to the second game: sales, marketing, publicity. (e.g. how to get the books out there and how to get them noticed.) Rarely if ever, do we turn to talking about how to craft a great book: what dialog does and doesn’t do, what makes descriptive passages pop, what models of plot structure are useful and why. There’s a good reason for that. It’s the same reason that back at work we talked about the new forms the accounting department wanted us to fill out more than how to troubleshoot DNS problems more effectively. We worry most about the parts we feel most behind on, even at the expense of the actual core of our jobs. And that’s especially true when we’re feeling overwhelmed.

  Speaking for myself, the reason I’ve kept with the traditional publishing model for all its faults and my complaints is that I’m not a good salesman. I’m a crap graphic designer. All I need to do it look at my copyedited manuscript to see how badly I need a copyeditor. I don’t have the contacts among the book buyers and distributors to get my stuff into stores. Each one of those, someone else does as their full-time job. They’re better at them than I will ever be, I am putting myself in competition with the projects they’re working on, and I don’t have the money to hire all those services out piecemeal.

  So for me, for now, this is how I’m keeping it from turning into a situation where the techs have to do everything. As publishing shifts, group co-ops are going become a viable option. Publishers will compete more on the services they provide to authors. Everything will go on changing with distribution, marketing, sales and profit sharing.

  Storytelling won’t, and that’s the part I want to be good at. More than that, it’s the part I want other writers to be good at. I believe that someone who has spent ten thousand hours honing her craft and struggling with all the difficulties and ambiguities of making a good novel is going to do a better job that someone who has spread that same time over half a dozen different jobs. I want to read the work of great writers, and so I want there to be great writers.

  I don’t think that can happen when we look at all the different things that putting a book into the world requires, shrug, and say we can have the techs do it.

  About the Author

  Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

  Editor’s Desk: Publishing Turns Like a Battleship

  Neil Clarke

  There was a time in my life when I frequented a lot of online message boards. These days, I still do occasional drive-bys to see what’s going one in that corner of the universe. One of the places I’ve been popping into lately is frequented by many self-published authors. While there, I stumbled across a discussion that resonated my experiences from the early years of Clarkesworld.

  The central theme of the discussion was about respect. More specifically, whether or not self-published authors had felt welcome among their traditionally-published colleagues. The responses ranged from the militant “those people are so stupid for giving up all their money to NY publishers” to “some of my best friends are traditionally published” and back around to “they never take us seriously, but we’re just as professional as they are.”

  If we hopped in our time machine and went back six or seven years, you’d find that the publishers of many online magazines made similar statements. To give you a taste of the climate:

  We regularly encountered authors that told us they wouldn’t submit to an online magazine, despite the fact that we paid almost double that of the professional print markets they were being published in.

  Several reviewers point-blank refused to consider our stories because they were published online.

  We were accused of “killing” magazines by giving content away.

  We weren’t real magazines because pixels are ephemeral and no one would be able to find our work in ten years.

  When we applied to SFWA to be a qualifying market in 2007, we had to help them understand how to gauge online readership. Much to their credit, they actually listened to what we had to say, but we had to keep pressing them to get a decision.

  It was a frustrating time to be publishing an online magazine, but those of us in the thick of things believed we were onto something promising. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how win over our critics or convince them that we weren’t pixel-stained technopeasants. (That phase caused quite a response among writers in 2007 and may have been the first sign that the tide was changing.)

  It was also an exciting time to be publishing an online magazine. It was a wild frontier with lots of ideas and new approaches. It was never dull and there were always new readers coming into the fold. From the outside, it probably looked like chaos and the traditional publishers (and many authors) simply didn’t quite know what to make of it. Years later, a well-known publisher joked with me, “we’ve always been interested in the digital publishing, but were content to let other people take all the risk in discovering what worked.”

  By 2008, the climate was already drastically different and over the next year, it began to feel like the industry was beginning to accept us. While we had always had the respect of our readers, crossing that line was a very validating experience. As much as we may not want to care what others think, it can have a significant impact on your outlook towards things.

  Better yet, the traditional and online publishers started talking. Seriously talking. We had (and still have) a lot to learn from one another. In my humble opinion, collectively, we’ve made the state of genre magazines a much healthier one. It’s somewhat incredible. You’d see us as competitors, but it feels more like a club. The medium we choose to publish in is no longer a factor in whether or not we are considered professional by our peers.

  Today, many indie authors are frustrated or upset with the way they feel shut out of the traditional writer’s club, so I presented my little story thinking it might help provide some hope. From where I stand, I can clearly see the early signs of progress. If I had to guess, within two-to-three years, we won’t be hearing much about respect based on the medium or method an author employs to publish their work.

  Traditional and indie publishing models both have value and the smart money is on those that embrace the best of both. Established authors like Mike Resnick have self-published portions of their back-catalog and well-known indie authors like Hugh Howey have signed book deals with NY publishers. It starts on the fringes and works its way in until it hits critical mass.

  The next day, curious about what they thought of what I had to say, I checked back in at the forum. Sadly, my response was deleted without explanation.

  On a happier note, it is with gre
at pleasure that I inform you that “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. This is the second Clarkesworld story to win a Nebula and I can tell you that watching one of our authors win an award never gets old.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Locus Magazine has announced the finalists for the 2013 Locus Awards. In a repeat of the Hugo Award nominations, “Immersion” once again stands with “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson and Clarkesworld is a finalist for Best Magazine!

  I’d like to thank everyone that has nominated or voted for in any of the awards this year. Reviews, recommendations, nominations, subscriptions, and comments show us just how much you appreciate what we do.

  Thanks for your continued support!

  About the Author

  Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2013 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.