1st Draft done. 2nd Draft done, Currently reorganizing up to 3rd and hopefully final draft.
Waiting to do a few interviews. Doing the cut off.
Current events
Season 14 Review – Doctor Who Stumbles Along
Well, the verdict is in, at least for this season.
So what have we got?
Disappointment I’m afraid.
So far the Gatwa era consists of an extended cameo in David Tenant’s “The Giggle,” the Christmas Special, “Church on Ruby Road,” and an eight episode season starting with Space Babies and Ending with Empire of Death.
Overall impressions? Deeply uneven. Mostly unsatisfying. Three brilliant episodes, two unfocused sub-par efforts that we’ll generously call mediocre, and an opening and closing set of dumpster fires.
The larger problems? Gatwa’s overacting masks an underlying lack of commitment or emotional depth. RTD has become a shallow parody of himself. And critically, the show is deeply stagnant and failing to evolve or change. We’re getting the same old same old, as we got fifteen years ago, just tired and worn out.
PERVERSIONS & INFIDELITIES, DEUX
Eve St. Albert returns with her second volume of Perversions and Infidelities, three more novellas of desire, transgression, sex and satisfaction. Perversions and Infidelities is a four book series being produced by Fossil Cove Publishing, with Dawne Dominque as the cover artist. The first three books each contain a series of novellas featuring erotic tales for a women’s readership. These are stories of empowerment, adventure and satisfaction. Of women breaking free of their normal lives, embarking on transgressive sexual journeys, exploring power, identity, fantasy and desire and ultimately, finding their true selves.
NASFIC, DAYS 3 & 4, July 20 & 21
[photo from File 770, the Doctor Who Panel]
NASFIC DAY 3 AND 4
I AM A LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR… that was my throwaway intro on my first panel. But I liked it, it felt right, so I used it for the rest of my programming. I think I’ll make it my catch prhase. Sometimes I’d follow up with, ‘…. a lawyer’ or sometimes ‘…. and also a lawyer.’
The humans would laugh, I’d smile at them, and we’d just get on with things.
But I’ll tell you, there’s something really satisfying about beginning with this moment of honesty. It starts things off on the right foot.
NASFIC AND MARKETING
My last panel for NASFIC was on Marketing. I shared it with J.F. Holmes, former military guy, small press guy – Canon Publishing, a military SF publisher ; and Michael Green Jr., a well traveled data scientist.
Marketing is a tough subject. It doesn’t come instinctively to writers – the skills and mindset necessary to write a novel, are not necessarily the skills and mindset to go out into the marketplace. But appallingly, it’s being dumped on writers more and more.
Unless you’re a runaway best seller, or they sniff that about you, major publishers leave marketing to writers. So much so, that Amazon has a special program where traditionally published authors can buy advertising – imagine that, pouring your advance into advertising your own book, so that the publisher can make enough money to give you another book, and an advance that you can pour into advertising for them.
Small Presses, also mostly leave marketing to the writer, although some of them make efforts for you. I’m sympathetic mostly – running a small press is incredibly hard, requires all kinds of time, more skills than any one person has, and is typically a labour of love. They offload marketing to the writer because they have no time, no money and not the first clue about marketing in many cases.
Of course that makes me less interested in small presses. If they’re not doing anything that I can’t already do for myself, and the area that I’m weak in is the area that they’re weak in… what’s the point. A small press that partners and helps teach or educate you on marketing is great, I’ll sign up. If not, then why bother?
NASFIC DAY TWO, JULY 19, 2024
Picture – Electric Tower, Buffalo downtown. Steel frame art deco building built by the local utility company in the early era of electrification.
NASFIC – Day Two
No walking around exploring the City. Just no time. Went to a convenience store and stocked up on bottled water, that’s about it. Not much in the way of attending Panels. I sat in on a reading. Attended a panel on Anthologies, and another on Small Press. Mainly, activities were preparing for panels, re-reading, psyching up. There were a lot of them – I had six programming items, five panels and a reading, and I was moderating three panels. It took a lot of my focus.
* 11:00 am – Public Domain with Leigh Grossman and Vaughne Hansen. This went really well. We filled half the room on a friday morning, which was incredible to me. I moderated, we through a lot of information at the audience, people asked questions, everyone was engaged. Got along really well. I felt we were scattershot, but everyone seemed thrilled and happy to have learned stuff.
* 3:00 pm – Current SF on TV – Chuck Rothman, again Cameron Calkins, Fingers and Maria. I thought this would be my toughest one – there’s just so much SF on TV, it’s impossible to keep up. But it went well. We all just kept on talking.
* 5:00 pm – Impact of AI on SF Writing and Art – my second AI panel, this one I’m moderating. Neil Clarke again Ira Nayman, and Alex Shvartzman. The big one – we got the Grand Ballroom to work in. I moderated again. Went extremely well. Wide ranging discussion, at points we verged on conspiracy theory, but the reality is that the corps that are pushing this have an extralegal strategy. The message – keep watching, talking pushing back.
NASFIC, DAY ONE, JULY 18, 2024
NASFIC – Day One
Slept in. Showered. Studied notes. Registration didn’t open until noon. So about 11:30, went downstairs, talked to people. Got registered. Ate at the local restaurant. Went outdoors for a walk – got to get those 10,000 steps in. Found a funky little bookstore – Fitz’s Books and Waffles. Didn’t see any waffles.
Came back in time for the Dealers Room and Art Show to open. Wandered around there. It was a little awkward, a lot of dealers looking at me with puppy dog eyes – I felt guilty about not buying things. Saw Joshua Palmatier and Ira Nayman and a couple of other people I knew vaguely.
Chatted with Ira in the Dealers Room. It turns out, he’d mixed up his boxes, so he’d travelled all the way to Buffalo and had none of his own books to sell – just anthologies of other people’s stuff. Damn. I was frustrated. Last time I’d seen Ira, I’d bought one of his multiverse books, and had been half way through it when it accidentally fell into the toilet at the airport. I tried drying it with a hair dryer, but no go. I was hoping to buy a replacement and see how it turned out. Damn.
Then I ran into JF Garrand. I met her at CanCon last year, she’s a small press publisher, and we’d bonded over our mutual love of Hong Kong Vampire flicks. We hugged, weird experience, I’m not really a touchy feely person. We chatted for a bit, turns out she’s dealing with family grief. I know what that’s like. I plan to try and catch some of her panels tomorrow.
North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFIC) in Buffalo
JULY 17, 2024 – NASFIC MINUS ONE
Well, here we are in Buffalo, nine hours travel to get here. Checked into the hotel, napped for an hour. Travel always takes it out of me.
Then I wandered around outside the hotel, to get a grasp of the Convention geography. Then headed outside to experience downtown Buffalo and get my 11,000 steps in.
It was an odd experience – the downtown was empty on a late Wednesday afternoon. I barely saw anyone. Buffalo is about 300,000. The Buffalo-Niagara Metropolitan area is about 1.2 million. So about the size of Winnipeg. But the streets were shockingly vacant. It was peculiar. As it turned out, through the whole of my trip to Buffalo, whenever I went out, wherever I went, even looking out through the hotel windows, the downtown was always remarkably empty. There were people and cars now and then, but nowhere near what you’d expect for an urban downtown.
I had mixed impressions. There’s a lot of grand ambitious buildings, mostly early 20th century from the looks. From the era when steel frame construction was coming in, but the look and feel of the previous eras when all you had to work with was stone and beams is apparent. You can spot the difference, the old ‘stone and beam’ buildings have arches everywhere in door and window frames to redistribute weight. Steel buildings don’t need that, the steel carries the weight, so square windows, everything is a bit more blocky.
And big. Some seriously colossal buildings for the era. There were limits to how big you could go with nothing but stone, but with steel frames, you could go big. So a lot of the downtown buildings are imposing, there’s a lot of old fashioned grandeur to admire.
NAVIGATING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Recently, at a Science Fiction Convention, I had the opportunity to do a panel on this subject. I’ve decided it’s interesting enough to write up my notes into an article.
Okay, we all know what Copyright is, or hopefully we do. Copyright is all about the right to make copies, and particularly, it’s about who owns that right (creators hopefully), and how that right operates.
Public Domain is the other side of the coin. It’s about work that no one owns, and therefore is free to any member of the public to use. Basically, if something is not under Copyright, it’s in public domain, mostly. That’s the theory.
Sounds simple, right?
Yeah, everything is simple. Until you dig into it, and then you’re done for. That’s one of life’s rules.
KICKSTARTER! WELL, THAT’S DONE.
THE KICKSTARTER EXPERIENCE
Well, the Starlost Unauthorized Kickstarter is over. Frankly, I’m a bit relieved. It’s been a trip, but honestly, I felt a little bad about bothering people with my promotional efforts.
It worked though – I reached 230% of goal, or almost $2300.00 which is more than I’ve made for any other single book I’ve written… for a book I haven’t written. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
First, I should express my thanks: To Stephen Kotowych, who provided an incredibly clear, straightforward and useful presentation on Kickstarters at the Indy Writer’s Conference in Toronto, back in April, and who was kind enough to review my draft Kickstarter. Tao Wong, who organized the Indy Writer’s Conference, which ended up a cornucopia of useful ideas, advice and opportunities. Alex McGillivary, who also inspired with his Kickstarter for Bigfoot Country, and offered useful advice. Dean Naday, cinematographer and video editor who saved me from going over a cliff, and Anna Valdron, for support. Without each of them, this Kickstarter wouldn’t exist, or it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.
I also want to express my thanks to everyone who knew me and pledged. I am touched. Maybe it was just the project was kick ass and amazing, but I can’t help but narcisstically feel that it was a personal gesture of faith and friendship, and that means a lot.
And my thanks to all the people who had no clue who I was, but decided that this project was worthwhile and deserved support. I think that was about 60% of my backers. To you, I say: Brothers! Sisters! Indeterminate strangers! I love that you love this subject, I’m passionate about it too!