What I'm Reading

Ice + History + Monsters = Awesome

Okay, so the title of this post is a little off. If you want to be technical, it should probably be "What I Read A Little While Ago." But I've been wanting to this a regular (at least, for me) thing on the ol' blog for a while now, so I'm going to start with a book I finished about a month ago because I loved the hell out of it.

Anyway, today's book is The Terror, by Dan Simmons. I first read Mr. Simmons way back in high school, when a friend turned me on to Hyperion. (Awesome sci-fi book that was a bit over my head when I first read it. I need to get back to that now that I'm old and shit.) I hadn't read any Simmons since, but then I found The Terror on a shelf at Third Place Books* here in Seattle and  bought it because one of the clerks had written a review that made it sound awesome. And you know what? It IS awesome.

* If you like books and live in Seattle, you must go to the Third Place Books on 65th. They have a pub in the basement. We call it the Hobbit Hole because it's all made of wood and cozy and you're surrounded by books and nice people and beer.

Anyway, The Terror isn't a sci-fi book. It's actually a dense historical fiction novel about two English ships searching for the Northwest Passage in the mid-1800s. Said ships end up getting stuck in the ice for a very, very, very long time, and after a while the crew begins to suffer all the usual lost at sea horrors: starvation, poisoning, turning on each other, etc.  ...Oh, and did I mention that there's also a monster out on the ice that starts killing off crew members in the most horrific ways possible? Because, yeah. Giant scary monster.

The Terror is unlike any book I've ever read. On one hand, it's a gripping historical drama that Mr. Simmons clearly researched the hell out of. And on the other hand, it's a fantastic horror story. How he manages to smash these two things together and keep the pace up for 800 pages is beyond me, but my god, does he ever do it well.

So anyway, yes. The Terror. If you like historical fiction, horror fiction, or just a writer who is really at the top of his craft, I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

The Awesomest of Wednesdays

Yeah, so I'm not sure 'awesomest' is a word. Actually, it's probably not. But this is why blogs have editors. ...Well, good blogs. Or at least rich ones. It's just me and the dog up in this here blog, and she's outside chewing on a stick, so I guess you get what you get.

Anyway, I got a package on my doorstep today. At first i thought it was the OUYA that I kickstarted a while ago, since that was supposed to be on the way. In fact, i was so sure that's what it was that I didn't open it, because I was trying to write a guest blog post and didn't want to be distracted. So imagine my surprise when I finally did open the thing and found...this:

Now don't get me wrong -- i was excited to try out the OUYA. But man, this is so, so much better, I can't even tell you. This thing is real, man. It's actually going to happen. June 4th can't get here soon enough.

Hope Springs

Mariner Baseball: Trying to Suck Slightly Less This Year

Hey, Hope Springs. That's clever, huh. I bet no one ever thought of that before. Hold on, lemme check. 

*checks*

...Damn you, Meryl Streep! You ruined my perfectly good blog title!

Okay, fine. Screw that no-talent hack Meryl Streep. I spent a good 30 seconds on the opening of this post, and I'm not changing the title now. Besides, this isn't a post about failed-marriage movies. It's about one of my favorite days of the year: Opening Day of the baseball season.

As you may or may not know, yours truly is a big fan of the Seattle Mariners. And as you also may or may not know, the Seattle Mariners have been pretty much terrible for almost their entire existence. There was a fun stretch from 1995 - 2002 where they occasionally won games and even division titles, but those days were a long time ago. The current Mariners are more like a clown car at the circus—except instead of screeching to a halt and letting all the clowns run out, the car drives in circles for a while before flipping over and exploding, killing everyone in the front row and horribly maiming the elephants. I mean, they've been bad. Really, really bad. And more than that, they've been dull. They had one of the worst offenses in the history of anything in the last three years, which meant i was often clicking off my radio when they got down by two runs. There just wasn't any point.

But this year is different! There's a strange sense in the air among M's fans, something almost like hope. Sports fans in Seattle are a jaded breed. We haven't won a major championship* in anything since 1979, which means I've gone my entire life without knowing what that's like. And all of that losing has made us pretty wary when it comes to sports. Hope is in short supply in Sea-town. Decades of despair have told us that it's actually better to have never loved at all, because loving and losing is just a big ol' kick in the junk, and who wants that?

* The Seattle Storm won a championship at some point, which was cool, but not exactly a major city-wide celebration. Also the UW football team won something at some point, but i could care less about college football, and since it's my blog, i'm going to ignore it.

But this year, we have offense. Or, as the great Jeff Sullivan would say, Dingers! Veteran big dudes who can hit the ball a very long way now patrol the outfield*. A big dude is our DH. Young dudes both big and not so much have looked good in spring training, which means they might take a step forward, which means we might actually be decent this year. This is hope to a Mariner fan. We don't think World Series or really even playoffs -- we just want to be halfway decent.

* By patrolling the outfield, I really mean overrunning balls, making bad pick-off throws, and generally falling down for no apparent reason. ...I'm looking at you, Raul Ibanez.

So this is our hope, and this day, one of my most favorite days of the year, is the epitome of that home. Everyone has a perfect record. Everyone is tied for first. And you can sit back and squint, and sometimes, if you look just right, you can actually see a scenario where we might really be in this thing.

Happy Opening Day, everyone.

In Which I Try and Fail to Describe Visiting Penguin Books

So i wasn't quite sure what to expect when I went to Penguin Books. My first thought was that it would be this kind of magical Willy Wonka place with slides and chocolate pools and small orange people running around with wheelbarrows full of novels ripe for the picking. ...But it wasn't like that.

I also thought it might be some kind of sleek modern office, kind of like the interior of the Death Star combined with a lot of black plastic desks and those electronic keyboards you always see in old 70's sci-fi movies. I mean, we've all heard tales of Big Publishing, and so i was prepared to find a heartless, monolithic corporation where the only thing that mattered were fat stacks of cash and the latest stock prices. Oh, and there were also lots of guards in this scenario, most of whom were grim and unsmiling. ...But it wasn't like that, either.

You know what it was? It was an office. It had metal filing cabinets and decent carpet and an elevator that went really fast. It had an old coffee maker that looked like it came from the Cold War with one of those Make A New Pot If You Drink The Last One!  signs taped to it. It had desks covered in toys and desks covered in paperwork and a few desks clearly owned by OCD folks that kept everything filed away in neat little stacks. Oh, and there was a guard, but it was just one guy in the lobby who actually did smile a little bit. Basically, it was like most any other office that I've ever visited or worked in, with one major exception:

The books.

The books, dudes. Oh my god, there were books EVERYWHERE! Books in cabinets, books on desks, books stacked up on top of other books. They have these things called "Take Shelves," which are giant bookcases filled with books that you—or anyone else—can take. And have. For FREE. And we're not talking one or two shelves here. I saw ROOMS full of Take Shelves. In fact, there are so many books there, you'll sometimes see a pile of them with a hand-written sign that says This is NOT a Take Shelf, just so you know that even Heaven has limits to things. For a guy like me, a guy who has so many books that they're currently sitting on the floor in my living room because we're totally out of space, this was just about the most amazing thing that I'd ever seen.

Another fun thing about Penguin is the people. Everyone I talked to, and I mean down to the very last soul, was almost infallibly kind to me. And they didn't have to be. I mean, yeah they're going to be publishing my book, but in the big scheme of things I'm small potatoes. But everyone I saw took a moment to say hi or shake my hand or even tell me that they liked the novel, which was nice of them even if it was just to make me feel better. Hell, Anne Sowards talked to me for like 15 minutes about the cruise she'd just taken, and she's a busy freakin' lady.

Oh, and I also saw a guy in a penguin suit walking to a meeting. Full-on penguin suit, too. Big floppy feet and everything. That made my day.

Anyway, the other person who talked to me way more than she had to was Ginjer Buchannan, who has been my editor on The Beautiful Land since I won the ABNA almost a year ago. Ginjer is smart and funny and has been doing this forever, and she's one of those people who knows eeeeverybody. When we were at lunch (yes, she even took me to lunch), she seemed to know every author that I would bring up.

"Oh, [FAMOUS WRITER PERSON]? Yeah, his wife's a vegan. We go out sometimes."

"Her? Oh, sure. I've met [FAMOUS WRITER PERSON] a bunch of times. Really nice. Father was a coal miner."

And so on. Ever since I tried to become a published writer (so, like, forever?), I've had a vision of an editors as these mystical creatures who sit at their desks with martinis in hand chain-smoking cigarettes like they were about to become illegal. And while Ginjer didn't actually do any of those things, she was still somehow exactly what I thought an editor should be. She also had some good advice to me noobish questions, most of which boiled down to "Keep writing and make it good, kid." ...Although spoken with much more eloquence.

It's weird. I'm trying to write what the whole experience was like, but i'm not really doing it justice. The place, the actual physical office, was so mundane that it caught me off guard. But then the people inside the office were just so nice that it didn't seem to fit. I mean, I've worked in offices before. People tend to be grumpy, especially on a Friday when they're at work instead of getting drunk somewhere. Maybe I just caught everyone on a good day, I dunno. But I'd rather think it's just this office full of decent people with a shared love for writing and creativity, and that those traits make getting up and coming into work in the morning just a little bit easier.

PS - Oh, and I know I promised photos, but I've decided not to use them. One is the front of the building, which seems a little creepy stalker-ish, and the other is... Well, not usable. Anyway, here's a picture of my dog just to end things on a cute note. D'aw.

If You Can Make It There...

Hey, all! I'm back, and filled with all kinds of crazy book news. Yes, for realz. Book news. (Or newz, if i want to keep the whole 'z' thing going. But eventually this post will look like a Mountain Dew can if i do that, so probably best to cut it short.)

Yes, so I went to New York this past week for a vacation, and while I was there I managed to finagle a meeting with both my editor at Penguin Books AND a real-life literary agent. I thought I might have to shoot them both with sleep darts and attach those little tracking thingies to their ears before they'd agree to meet with me, but surprisingly enough both of them were really amicable about the whole thing.

Anyway, the long and short of all that is that said agent and I hit it off really well, and he's agreed to represent my in my future book-writing endeavors. And who is this agent, you ask? Why, it's none other than Mr. Evan Gregory! Evan works for the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, enjoys nothing more than pouring over contracts late into the night, and is chock-full of good advice. Oh, and he's much better looking than me. Don't believe me? Check out his Twitter profile.  Grawl, right? (Er, but I mean that in a professional way. Like, "Grawl, look at the way he makes those deals!" "Grawl, I can't believe he got such a good percentage on that...one...thing..." Okay, never mind. This got awkward fast.)

Anyway, I'm very happy to have an agent in my life now, because that means someone who knows what they're doing will actually be working on my behalf. I suppose I could have just continued on my own, but I tried to do that with the plumbing once and we still haven't gotten the smell out of the carpet.

As for the Penguin visit, I promise to write about that at some length tomorrow. I even have pictures! ...Well, okay. I have two pictures. And one is of the outside of the building. But hey, whatever. If you're anything like me, you've probably always wondered what goes on inside a publishing house, yes? (Hint: It's a lot like any other office, only with more books. ...MANY more books.) So come back tomorrow and learn what that was all about!*

* That's supposed to be a tease so you'll check back with the blog later. Did it work?

Oh, and in case you don't follow me on Twitter yet and didn't see the pic I sent out, Penguin gave me an advanced copy of The Beautiful Land. Oh god, it's amazing. I put it up on the bookcase of my house, and it fits very nicely in between Margaret Atwood and Russell Banks. ...I'm pretty sure Mrs Atwood and Mr Banks are less than thrilled at the company, but alphabetical order can be a real bitch sometimes, am I right? Anyhoo, here's the picture if ya missed it:

...I will never, ever, ever get tired of looking at that.

The Annual ABNA Question Hour

Okay, first of all, i don't know if this will be an annual thing. Judging by the number of questions i received, probably not. However, i'm nothing if not a sunny optimist, so let's go with that for now and leave 2014 to itself.

So as you may or may not know, a week ago i asked folks to write in with their ABNA questions on the off-chance i might be able to help them. I was figuring i'd get a metric ton of emails. Turns out i got significantly less than that. So many less, actually, that I've had to make up some of the questions myself. However, I'm hoping that you won't notice which questions are from readers and which are from me, since I'm all smooth like that. And so, without further ado...

Q: Is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award a scam?

A: This is the most common question I (and my fellow 2013 ABNA-ers) receive, actually. And i understand it, because in a lot of ways, the contest seems like one of those too-good-to-be-true things. But here's the deal: It's not a scam. It's free to enter, free to participate, and at the end of the day, somebody (or a few somebodies) walk away with a bunch of money and a publishing contract. No, I'm for seriously. You don't have to pay anything.

Q: What's up with the whole "non-negotiable" contract thing? 

A: Okay. So if you're a finalist -- and you want to keep being a finalist -- you are required to sign a publishing contract which lays out the terms of your deal. The contract is pretty standard, and as a guy who's just been poking along doing freelance writing for a long time, it strikes me as being incredibly fair.* You don't get a bazillion dollars or anything, but you get a fair cut of everything and also a break into the industry, which is really almost more important than the money, IMO.

Here's the thing, though—you don't have to sign the contract. If you get to the finals and you look over the contract and you decide "Screw this! I'm out!", then you simply refuse to sign and your slot in the finals is given to someone else. Your book isn't held hostage, you aren't sued, nothing. You can, in the words of The Humungus, just walk away. Now, i have no earthly idea why a person would do that, but i suppose it's possible. So if that seems like something you would like to do, then don't let it preclude you from entering.

* Note that this is all based on my experience from last year, when the prize was a publishing contract from Penguin Books. This year Amazon is doing the publishing themselves, so i can't speak as to the nature of that deal. However, this is a pretty high-profile thing for Amazon, and i can't see how it would benefit them to bring new authors into the fold and then promptly screw them over.

Q: How did you get so handsome?

A: Aw, shucks. You didn't need to send that question.

Q: Does Penguin own the rights for all eternity, or only a set period of years?

A: I actually had to go pull the contract out and look it over to find this answer. Penguin owns the rights to publish and license the book for the length of the copyright -- so, yeah. Essentially forever.

Update: Okay, so I'm not a lawyer. As pointed out in the comment below by Mr. Evan Gregory, the rights revert to me if the book goes out of print.

Q: No, really. How are you so handsome? You're like a goddamn Greek god with flowing locks and mighty pectorals and all that.

A: Well, I work out a lot. And, you know. Good genes. Hold on, i need to bench press this couch here for a second. *Rrrrrrgh!* Okay, whew! Back to it. These are good questions, by the way. Keep 'em coming.

Q: Does Penguin own you forever? Do they own all your upcoming books forever?

A: Penguin has an option for my next work of fiction, which essentially amounts to a right of first refusal. So if i send it to them and they like it, we have a window of time in which to negotiate terms for those rights. If we can't come to an agreement, I'm free to shop it around to whoever i want, but i can't accept less than Penguin's best offer.

Q: Dear sir, I represent the estate of Sister Marjorie Hemmer. She has left you the amount of $7,000,000 US in order to do Lord's work because you are good and kind man. We only need you account number to begin the transfer—

A: Whoops. Wrong inbox. Sorry about that.

Q: I think the book cover is great. Did you have any input for that? Have you ever self published before? What's it like getting published by a big pub? 

A: I also think the book cover is freakin' awesome. I did not have any input with that, but i also didn't want anything to be changed when they first showed it to me. I thought it was damn near perfect. Now, if I had strenuous objections, i get the feeling we could have worked out an arrangement. But in this case, it wasn't necessary.

And yes, I self-published before, and my experience was less than stellar. Honestly, I'm not very good at promotion, and self-publishing is a lot of that. So i'm kind of thrilled to be working with a large publishing house that does this kind of thing all the time. Learning from all of their experience has been very helpful for me.

Please note that the above is not, in ANY WAY, some kind of condemnation of self-publishing. I think it's a fascinating new market and i'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of self-published books that are great. This is just me personally saying that I wasn't good at the amount of haranguing and constant marketing that it seems to require to get your book out there and noticed. I didn't know how to do it well, and i found attempting it to be incredibly draining. Call that lazy or stupid or introverted or whatever -- i'm not going to argue with you. It's just not my thing.

Q: Oh my god, your muscles! They're bulging! So huge and ripply! Brad Pitt has nothing on you!

A: Is that a question? ...Aw, who cares? I'll leave it in.

Q: Any advice for the actual ABNA entry?

A: TAKE YOUR NAME OFF THE MANUSCRIPT! Seriously. Do a search for it, then pull that thing out.

Also remember that the judges in the contest are NOT out to screw you over, and none of them hate you or otherwise have some kind of personal vendetta against you. If your book falls out of the early rounds, it's because art is subjective and yours just didn't strike a chord with the right person at the right time. I mean, take last year for example. Yeah, I think The Beautiful Land is a good little book, but i also got very lucky in terms of who my readers were -- they clearly enjoyed the idea and the story, which means they probably had at least some love for sci-fi in general. Hell, one of the final three judges on the panel was Anne Sowards, the head of science-fiction and fantasy acquisition for Penguin Books. That's not hard work on my part, that's just really good luck. And yeah, the book had to be decent and well-written and all that, but luck plays a big role in all of this -- probably more than any of us are comfortable admitting. Keep that in mind as you go through the process. Rejection doesn't equal terrible. Not by a long shot.

Q: Anything else you want to say before I tear off your shirt and paint a portrait of you standing astride the world with a rose in your teeth, you manly man, you?

A: Good luck and keep at it. Writing is like any other job -- you have to work to get better at it. Sometimes the world will screw you over and sometimes it'll throw you a bone you don't deserve, but you've got to keep riding it out in order to get to one point or the other.

ABNA Question Hour

Yes, yes. Long time, no blog. I know. There's actually an equation for this kind of long break between blog posts, and it goes something like this:

Holidays + Working on New Book x Dog + Trying to Finish Unread Books from Last Year x Far Cry 3 = I Don't Blog Very Much.  ...Or, if you prefer, H + NB(D) + URB(FC3) = Blargh.

However, it's a new year with new possibilities, and that's a fun thing. And one of those new possibilities is the ALL-NEW 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award! Yes, the same award that i stole last year. (...Did i say stole? Ha! I meant to say "thieved." Much more literary that way.) Also, the ABNA is not actually a possibility for me this year since I already stole it once, but it is a possibility for YOU! So if you've been thinking about the ABNA and wondering if that manuscript that's been sitting in of bottom of your desk is worth entering, the answer is YES! Yes, yes, yes. It's free for one, and for two, you could actually win the thing. I mean, look at me. I didn't think i had a chance in hell at this, but i entered the thing on a lark and now I'm driving a gold car and throwing dimes down on poor schoolchildren from the passenger seat of my new dirigible.*

*Not actually happening.

Anyway, off and on through the year, I've been getting emails from folks who saw that I won the contest and had some questions about the process. And I thought, Hey! It would be super-fun and perhaps veeeery slightly helpful if I were to answer these questions in blog form. It would be like a fun Q&A kind of thing, only with more random asides like this picture of two nerds blowing trumpets.

...That seriously makes me laugh every time I see it. Ah ha ha ha!

Anyhoo, that's my thought. But of course, in order to make this work, I'm going to need some questions. So if you've been wondering about the ABNA and all that went into it, drop me a line and lemme know. You can use my email or twitter account, both of which are located in the Contact section of this fine blog that you're on right now. I'll post answers sometime soon.

PS - Oh, and hey. If you're interested in entering the ABNA, or just seeing all its new fancy rules, you can find the info HERE.