jimhines

Catherynne Valente recently posted two essays about gender issues, both of which are worth reading.¹

“If you watch these ads, and mainstream sitcoms, you see this place. This place where men and women can barely stand each other long enough to have mutually unfulfilling sex and procreate. Where women are the sole source of everything irritating and wrong in a man’s life, plus she’s never hot enough, plus you have to, like, interact with her sometimes.”

It’s gotten me thinking about masculinity and what it means to “Be a man” in this culture.  The way we’re taught to act with other men and with women, the roles and responsibilities we’re supposed to take on, the things we are and aren’t supposed to worry about….

What a bunch of insane, contradictory crap.  Here are just a few of the “rules” I’ve come up with.

1. Avoid traditionally feminine activity.  Dishes, laundry, diapers, vacuuming — these activities generate massive quantities of femions that cling to your skin and cause penis cancer.
2. Hanging out with women is a chore.  Women only want to shop and go to chick flicks.  Men should hang out with other men, being manly together.  (But in a totally heterosexual way.)
3. Holding a woman’s purse makes you temporarily gay.
4. Much like the light of a red sun robs Superman of his power, pastels drain a man’s masculinity.  Beware the power of baby blue kryptonite.
5. Sex is a competition.  (Seriously, WTF people???)
6. Homosexuality is a fate worse than death.  Lesbians are hot.  This is not a contradiction.
7. Your daughter, being a girl, will be completely incapable of taking care of herself.  Meet any potential boyfriends at the door while carrying a shotgun.
8. Your place in Heaven is determined by the size of your penis and the amount of hair on your scalp.

I was planning to transition into my own thoughts about being a man.  What I think a real man should be.  A healthier, better list.  But it didn’t work.  Say you go with “A real man takes care of his family.” Why does this have anything to do with gender?  “A real man protects those who need his help.” And a real woman doesn’t?  “A real man respects women.”  No, a decent human being respects women.  And men.

But I did come up with one guideline.  Because a real man can speak out against sexism and homophobia, and be heard in a way that women speaking those same words might not be.  Because women complaining about sexism are dismissed as ball-busting feminazis with no sense of humor.

I’ve watched it happen again and again.  A woman writes or speaks about a topic and gets ignored.  I or another man speak out about the same thing, and there’s an outpouring of support and agreement.  I still get blown off, but not as often or in the same way as I see happening to women.

Being a man means I’m given certain advantages, including the power to speak out and be listened to.  Being a good man means using that voice to fight this hateful sexist crap.

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

A little while back I received a review copy of A Gathering of Doorways [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] by Michael Jasper.  Mike is someone I’ve known online almost since I started writing.  He’s a good guy, and a very good writer.  (See my reviews of The Wannoshay Cycle and his excellent collection Gunning for the Buddha.)

In Doorways, Gil and Melissa and their son Noah are trying to make a living on their new farm, despite the strange, toxic water slowly encroaching onto their land.  One of Jasper’s strengths is his characterization, making Melissa and Gil not shining fantasy heroes, but real people with real flaws.  Their marriage is already strained following the stillbirth of their second child, and then Noah wanders into the forest and disappears while Gil was supposed to be watching him.

Much as I wanted to see Gil and Melissa working together, that would be the easy route.  The anger and fear between husband and wife as they each try to find their son was painfully real.  As usual, Jasper’s cast of secondary characters were equally engaging, with their own flaws and hidden motives and conflicts.

Five-year-old Noah, on the other hand, never quite clicked for me.  It felt like Jasper was trying too hard to make him childlike, uses words like “kest” for quest, and following logid that didn’t quite ring true.  It felt like an adult trying to write a child instead of a real child, if that makes sense.

I liked the surreal Undercity, the nightmarish fairy tale world beneath the forest.  It’s disturbing as heck, treading that dark fantasy line between the fantastic and the horrific.  But I didn’t feel like I was seeing or learning enough about the Undercity to understand it.  For much of the book, it’s a vague danger.  I don’t understand how things work or what’s really at risk.

Eventually, we discover what’s going on in the Undercity — the power struggle, the reason the poisons are leaking out into the world above, and so on.  But I wanted to get more of that sooner.  Not the whole picture, perhaps, but I needed more to ground me in this world and make it real for me.

You can find more about the book at Jasper’s web site, or read a longer excerpt at BSCReview.

I’m not a big dark fantasy reader, and I suspect fans of that genre would enjoy the book.  If you’re less into the dark side of the genre, I’d probably steer you toward The Wannoshay Cycle first.  Jasper’s a good writer; I just don’t know if I was the right audience for Doorways.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I don’t know how much e-books should cost.  I’ve read arguments for sliding-scale prices.  I know lots of people don’t want to pay over a certain price.  I don’t have an answer.

I don’t know whether Macmillan’s agency agreement would be better for authors and readers than some other approach.

I don’t know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop.

I don’t know whether people are going to love Snow Queen.

I don’t know where I get my ideas.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to post the cover art to Red Hood’s Revenge [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon].

I don’t know how long I have before my son stops running up to hug me when I come home from work.

I don’t know if my home has adequate weaponry to protect my family against the zombie uprising.

I don’t know whether I should set Snow Queen revisions aside for a week so I can write up and pitch a new series to DAW.

I don’t know why “Single Ladies” won a Grammy.  (But I think it had something to do with the Chipmunks movie.)

I don’t know why I’m so incredibly bad with names and faces.

I don’t know how Randall Munroe does it.

I don’t know how single parents balance work, kids, and sanity.

I don’t know why the catfish in our aquarium keep dying.

I don’t know why religion is ever worth killing for.

I don’t know if I should create a fan page on Facebook.

I don’t know whether an anime-style Snoopy fighting cat-ninjas would be awesome or terrifying.  ETA: socchan brings the awesome here.

I don’t know where this post came from.  I guess I just thought the Internet would be a slightly better place if people were willing to admit they didn’t know things from time to time.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I’ve been thinking about e-books a lot lately, for some reason.  (Amazon still hasn’t restored Macmillan titles, last I checked.)  In particular, there’s a debate in the SFWA Lounge about the shift from printed books to electronic.

I think we’re in a very dynamic time.  E-books are changing, and we’re waiting to see who’s going to be the dinosaurs and who’s going to follow the superior evolutionary path of the  platypus.  Will multipurpose devices (iPad, smartphones) do away with single-purpose readers (Kindle)?  Will Cory Doctorow single-handedly throw DRM into the abyss forever?  Will e-books approach 100% market share, doing away with all but a handful of print-on-demand artifacts?

It occurred to me that there’s an element of privileged assumption going on with some of these predictions.  I’ve had this conversation online with people who obviously have stable Internet access and a fairly high degree of tech-savviness.  I also see it at conventions, where people whip out their Kindles and iPhones to compare features.

The thing is, these are luxuries.  If you’re in a financial position to afford the latest toys, great.  But to project near-100% dominance of electronic books assumes that either the reading devices will drop to a price where all readers can afford them, or that if you’re poor, you simply won’t/don’t read.

Tobias Buckell jokingly called for a boycott of Kindles until they bring the price down below $99.  (He’s trying to break Amazon’s “monopoly” on the Kindle.)  But even $99 is a lot of money, and not everyone is in a position to invest that much extra money every few years (because the technology keeps advancing) in their reading.

I do think e-books are going to be a larger part of the market.  We’ve seen cellphone novels take off in other countries.  E-books make tremendous sense for certain markets — universities, for example.  And the technology keeps advancing.  But I don’t think you can assume everyone is going to switch to electronic books any more than you can assume everyone is going to get flat screen plasma TVs.

Printed books are relatively cheap.  $7-8 for a new mass market paperback.  A buck or less for a used one.  I don’t see that going away any time soon. What do you think?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

So the writerly block of the Internet is up in arms after all of publisher Macmillan’s books (including major SF/F publisher Tor) vanished from Amazon.

According to a blogger at the New York Times:

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Neither Amazon nor Macmillan has weighed in on this yet, as far as I can find.  But we’re pretty sure Amazon pulled the books.  Unless Macmillan pulled them.  But it was probably Amazon.  We think.  At least according to that single unnamed source in the NY Times blog….

The timing does seem highly suspicious.  It happened on a Friday, when companies would be slow to react, and right after the Apple iPad news (which also impacts the e-book wars).  And regardless of what happened, this sucks for a lot of writers, including many of my friends at Tor.

But despite all of the angry speculation, I don’t know what happened.  Once I have a little more information, I’ll happily join in the condemnations.  If Amazon pulled the books, then shame on them.  If Macmillan did it, then … well, WTF, Macmillan?  If it was a database glitch¹, a lot will depend on how fast Amazon fixes it and how quickly they apologize.

For now, I’m just going to say this looks bad, and I expect to see more info very soon.

ETA: That was quicker than I expected.  From the CEO of Macmillan:

“This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon.”

Click for the full article.  Thanks to Laura Anne Gilman for the update.

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Yesterday, Victoria Strauss tweeted a link to The Ugly Truth About Getting Your Book Published, in which Phil Cooke is just the latest voice to proclaim the Awful Truth about Publishing.

The article flaunts various numbers to show that book sales are PLUMMETTING, and everything is AWFUL!  (He also includes strategies for dealing with these awful truths.  Coincidentally, Cooke runs Cooke Pictures, a media/publicity consulting company who will happily help you survive this terrible storm … for a fee.)

(ETA: Phil Cooke commented to say that he does not, in fact, charge a fee for his services.  And then follows up with a sockpuppet.  Sigh…)

For example, “Bowker reports that 560,626 new books were published in the U.S. in 2008, which is more than double the number of new books published five years earlier (2003) in the U.S. These figures include print-on-demand and short-run books, which is where most of the growth has occurred.“  (Emphasis added.)

And then, from point number three, “Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have MathFail.  Let me break it down with simple and totally made-up numbers.

Let’s say a decade ago, 1000 different books were published, and each book sold an average of 10,000 copies.  1000 x 10,000 means 10,000,000 books sold overall.

Then print-on-demand technology leads to an explosion of self-publishing and vanity presses.  Ten years later, we have twice as many books being published.  But the average PoD title sells what, 100 copies?  Let’s be generous and call it 200.  Assuming no change at all in traditionally published¹ books, we see:

1000 x 10,000 = 10,000,000 traditionally published books.
1000 x 200 = 200,000 PoD books.
10,000,000 + 200,000 = 10,200,000 total books published.
10,200,000 / 2000 = 5100 average copies per book.

Oh noes!  Average book sales have been cut almost in half!  It’s the end of publishing … even though, in our made-up example, traditionally published books are selling just as well as they did a decade ago.

If you want to educate me, show me useful data.  Be specific.  Don’t just flash around misleading and utterly useless generalizations.

Want another example?  “A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.”

MathFail Redux.  If you sell a book to Tor or Baen or DAW, you have an extremely good chance of having your book stocked in an average bookstore.  “Sell” to Publish America, and your chances are closer to 0%.  But lump everything together, and you can get your average to be nice, scary, and utterly meaningless.

“Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies.”  And how many of those titles are out of print?  Specialty books?  Vanity Press?

It’s true that publishing is in a rough place right now.  Print runs really are down, overall … but not necessarily to the extent implied in Cooke’s article.  Things are changing, and we’re working to keep up and adapt.  It’s not the end of print, the end of publishing, or the end of the world.

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Jaclyn Dolamore (fabulousfrock on LJ), author of Magic Under Glass [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] announced yesterday that Bloomsbury will be doing a new cover for the book.  From the publisher, “The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly.”

This is Dolamore’s debut novel, which is scary and exciting and stressful all by itself.  Now add cover controversy and the unknown of a brand new cover.  This can’t have been an easy time.  I’m hopeful Bloomsbury gets it right this time, and that Dolamore is able to get back to writing and enjoying her debut.

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For those unfamiliar with Twitter, Fridays generate a fair number of #ff posts.  #ff stands for Follow Friday, people sharing a list of interesting Twitter accounts.  I figured I’d do the same for my blog reading list.

The Graveyard Shift- Lee Lofland is a veteran police investigator who blogs about different aspects of police procedure.  For a writer, the details he shares make his blog a gold mine.  He also posts regular reviews of Castle, which is a bonus.

jongibbs- Jon’s LiveJournal is another good one for writers, including link roundups and his own thoughts about various aspects of writing.  He comes at it not from the approach of telling you how it is, but instead asks questions and opens up discussion, as in this post about book trailers.

Writer Beware- I debated even mentioning this one.  Every writer out there is already following the Writer Beware blog, run by authors A. C. Crispin, Victoria Strauss, and Richard White, right?  Right?  Everything you wanted to know about writing scams and other pitfalls, and how to avoid them.  They’ve assisted the FBI in putting away several scammers (and they have a good sense of humor to boot).

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I’m off to ConFusion this afternoon.  I’m not going to post my full panel schedule, but let’s just say I expect to be a bit frazzled by the end of Saturday.  Seven panels plus the 5:00 autographing session.  This should be interesting.

Looking forward to seeing everyone!

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

So apparently this is the week for cover art kerfuffles.  We start with my own publisher DAW, who put out the anthology The Dragon and the Stars.  This is an anthology of “18 original stories melding the rich cultural heritage of China with the imaginative realms of science fiction and fantasy.”

In DAW’s defense, I believe the budget for their monthly anthologies is significantly smaller than for original novels, which I suspect is why they tend to go with stock art for the former.  And artistically, I like the look of this one.  I just wish they’d gone with stock art that showed a Chinese dragon instead of a western one.

Cover number two comes from Bloomsbury, who you might remember as the publisher that whitewashed the cover for Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar.  After much outcry from author and fans, Larbalestier’s cover was changed.  Now Bloomsbury brings us Magic Under Glass.  To quote the Book Smugglers review:

“Nimira is supposed to be dark-skinned! The book trailer captures that and is true to the book (check it out here) but the girl in the US covers is definitely white.”

It’s deja vu all over again.

Last but most certainly not least, oldcharliebrown points out the Baen covers from the Flandry books by Poul Anderson.  Young Flandry came out last month.  The cover for the forthcoming Captain Flandry is similar, aiming for that same demographic of young boys who for whatever reason can’t get real porn online.

I know many publishers have multiple imprints, but when did Baen launch their “Orgies in Space” line?  I’m all for not judging a book by its cover, but even as a teenaged boy I don’t think I could have brought this one into the house.  As a grownup wanting to introduce my daughter to SF/F, I’m embarrassed for my genre.

Click on any of the thumbnails for larger versions.

Please keep in mind that authors have little to no control over their cover art.  Larbalestier was able to push for new artwork for her book, but she’s a fairly high-clout author and was able to rally reader/fan support.  Generally, the author has little input into the cover.

So, what do you think?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

From this week’s episode of Criminal Minds, “The Uncanny Valley”:

“Diabetics metabolize everything they consume differently.  Food, drink, drugs … it all gets broken down into blood sugar.”

Ignoring the fact that not all food and drink gets broken into blood sugar (Coke Zero, anyone?), you’re telling me my drugs all turn into blood sugar too?  Guess I’d better start taking insulin with my cholesterol pills from now on.

The show also asserts that diabetics can metabolize drugs faster, and thus our victim could shake off the paralytic.  (Which was being received via an I.V. drip.)  This struck me at first as either poorly researched or poorly explained.

So I spent this morning digging up research so as not to come off as an idiot when I wrote my rant, and what do you know.  I came across a 2007 study from The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases which states:

In fact, type 1 diabetes not only leads to activation of drug metabolic genes, but also has a profound effect on the metabolism of certain drugs. Mice with induced type 1 diabetes rapidly clear their systems of a compound that induces temporary paralysis, while normal mice cannot.

From that same article, “Controlling the diabetes reversed the effect: when insulin was given to the mice, the CAR-induced genes turned off. “  So in theory, since this woman was off her insulin, there might have been a window where she would have thrown off the effects of the drugs before falling into a diabetic coma.

I’m not finding anything to support the idea that drugs all break down into blood sugar, though.  That one still strikes me as goblin dung.  According to the article above, a diabetic with out-of-control glucose doesn’t clear the drug by breaking it down into sugar, but because (in mice, at least) this activates certain genes that clear the drug from the system.

So, I’m cranky about the “Everything turns into sugar” bit, but it looks like they did the research on the rest.  Thanks for that, Criminal Minds — the widespread laziness and misinformation spread in most books and shows when it comes to diabetes is a huge peeve of mine.

On that note, if any of my writer friends are ever doing a story that includes diabetes and have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.  I’m not a doctor, but I can give you the basics and tell you what it’s like to live with the damn disease.

Also, I think I have a man-crush on Dr. Reid.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Publishers Weekly posted an article talking about a book piracy study released today by the Attributor.  PW article is here; their link to the original article wasn’t working.  My thanks to Rich at Attributor, who contacted me with a link to their study results, including methodology, here.

From PW:

Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked.

Anyone seeing any possible problems here?  Here are two that jumped out at me right off the bat.

1. The $3 billion figure assumes that everyone who downloaded an illegal copy of the book would have otherwise gone out and purchased a legal copy.
2. Attributor is a company specializing in anti-piracy solutions.  Hardly an objective or trustworthy source, in this case.

Please don’t take this as approval of illegal file-sharing.  I’ve made some stories available for free over on my web site (left sidebar), so I’m all for sharing some free fiction.  But when you upload a copy of one of my books to a file sharing site, you’re being a dick.  (Downloading a copy?  Lesser dick.)  If you don’t want to pay $7.99, no problem.  Go to a used bookstore.  Go to your local library.

That said, I don’t think piracy is the end of the world.  I just wish we could get more trustworthy data & discussion, and less dogma.

::Takes a deep breath::  So please feel free to talk piracy and file-sharing, but be aware that over-the-top extremism may be heavily mocked, regardless of what side it’s coming from.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.